Planet Arduino

GitHub user touchgadget converts a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro flight joystick into a Nintendo Switch compatible gamepad. This allows a player to play two thumb stick games using one hand.

No soldering required. This does not work for any other flight stick.

An Adafruit Feather RP2040 with USB Type A Host and joystick are powered by the Nintendo Switch so a battery is not needed. Just plug the joystick into the Feather then plug the Feather into the Switch. The software is coded in Arduino.

See the details and code on GitHub. Under an MIT license.

Peter started making an alarm clock during the pandemic with Adafruit Feather components. Things took off from there:

My next step was to make a “talking” clock which, at the push of a button, announces the time. This was a gift for my 91 year old mother-in-law who has almost completely lost her sight.

Recently I decided that I wanted some way in which the date and time parameters could be set without attaching the clock to a computer.

Using Adafruit’s open source designs, Peter modified the display to use 4 character 14 segment LED displays from China including integrated colons for the clocks.

All the code, in Arduino, has been made available.

You can see testing the displays in the video (below) and read it all in the post here.

Bedeck your Feather project with a beautiful Adafruit TFT FeatherWing, 3.5″ 480×320 Capacitive Touchscreen. This TFT display is 3.5″ diagonal with a bright white-LED backlight and a built-in microSD card socket. You get a massive 480×320 pixels with individual 16-bit color pixel control. This display comes with a multi-touch capacitive touchscreen to detect up to 5 finger presses anywhere on the screen.

The Adafruit 3.5″ Capacitive Touch TFT FeatherWing guide has everything you need to get started with using this FeatherWing. There’s pages for overview, pinouts, CircuitPython, Arduino and resources for download.

Check out the full guide: Adafruit 3.5″ Capacitive Touch TFT FeatherWing

The Adafruit USB Host FeatherWing makes it easy to add USB Host support, especially now that TinyUSB supports it in the Arduino library as a ‘native’ interface for host support. This Wing uses the MAX3421E – a tried and true USB Host chip. It uses SPI plus an IRQ pin to send data to just about any USB device.

The Adafruit USB Host FeatherWing guide has everything you need to get started with using this FeatherWing. There’s pages for overview, pinouts, Arduino and resources for download.

Check out the full guide: Adafruit USB Host FeatherWing

Spice up your Feather project with a beautiful 2.4″ touchscreen display shield with built in microSD card socket. This TFT display is 2.4″ diagonal with a bright 4 white-LED backlight. You get 240×320 pixels with individual 16-bit color pixel control. It has way more resolution than a black and white 128×64 display. As a bonus, this display comes with a resistive touchscreen attached to it already, so you can detect finger presses anywhere on.

The Adafruit 2.4″ TFT FeatherWing guide has been updated for rev B of the board. As of Oct. 11, 2023, we’ve updated this hardware to use the TSC2007 instead of the discontinued STMPE811 touchscreen controller. The screen and micro SD card are the same but any touchscreen code will need to be updated to use our Arduino or CircuitPython library. We’ve also updated the reset button to be right-angle and added a STEMMA QT port. Lastly, we’ve also updated it with Adafruit Pinguin to make a lovely and legible silkscreen. We have a new Pinouts page, new Arduino example, new CircuitPython example and updated resources on the Downloads page.

Check out the full guide: Adafruit 2.4″ TFT FeatherWing

Neat build from Elaine Gao up on Instructables! The finish product has a great look.

Ever forget to check the weather and end up without an umbrella? Introducing the Acrylic Weather Clock, an elegant weather forecasting device. Adorn your entryway with this stylish piece, and conveniently access weather forecast information before stepping out!

Xyla Foxlin and Becky Stern team up to develop DIY version of a bear that senses hugs and transmits them via the internet to a remote bear.

The project uses a number of Adafruit parts including Feather ESP8266 Huzzah boards, MPRLS pressure sensors and vibration motors attached to a permanent breadboard. Programming is via Arduino and  uses the Arduino IoT Cloud service.

See the video below and more in the post here. Via X.

[minh7a6] loves the Adafruit Feather, but sees some room for improvement.

First is the matter of 5V tolerance. While just about everything is available in a 3.3v range these days, sometimes it’s just nice not to have to care. The main controller on the Feather is plenty powerful, but its intolerant pins just wouldn’t do so it was swapped for a chip from the ever popular STM32F4 line.

Then he wanted better energy efficiency when running from battery. In order to achieve this he switched from a linear regulator to a buck-boost converter. He also felt that the need for a separate SWD adapter for debugging seemed unnecessary, so he built a Black Magic Probe right in.

He’s just now finishing up the Arduino IDE support for the board, which is pretty cool. There’s no intention to produce this souped up Feather, but all the files are available for anyone interested.

The HackadayPrize2019 is Sponsored by:

Ever hear of Microsoft Soundscape? We hadn’t, either. But apparently it and similar apps like Blindsquare provide people with vision problems context about their surroundings. The app is made to run in the background of the user’s mobile device and respond to media controls, but if you are navigating around with a cane, getting to media controls on a phone or even a headset might not be very convenient. [Jazzang] set out to build buttons that could control apps like this that could be integrated with a cane or otherwise located in a convenient location.

There are four buttons of interest. Play/pause, Next, Back, and Home. There’s also a mute button and an additional button you can use with the phone’s accessibility settings. Each button has a special function for Soundscape. For example, Next will describe the point of interest in front of you. Soundscape runs on an iPhone so Bluetooth is the obvious choice for creating the buttons.

To simplify things, the project uses an Adafruit Feather nRF52 Bluefruit board. Given that it’s Arduino compatible and provides a Bluetooth Human Interface Device (HID) out of the box, there’s almost nothing else to do for the hardware but wire up the switches and some pull up resistors. That would make the circuit easy to stick almost anywhere.

Software-wise, things aren’t too hard either. The library provides all the Bluetooth HID device trappings you need, and once that’s set up, it is pretty simple to send keys to the phone. This is a great example of how simple so many tasks have become due to the availability of abstractions that handle all of the details. Since a Bluetooth HID device is just a keyboard, you can probably think of many other uses for this setup with just small changes in the software.

We covered the Bluefruit back when it first appeared. We don’t know about mounting this to a cane, but we do remember something similar attached to a sword.

The 1970s called and they want their rotary dial cell phone back.

Looking for all the world like something assembled from the Radio Shack parts department – remember when Radio Shack sold parts? – [Mr_Volt]’s build is a celebration of the look and feel of a hobbyist build from way back when. Looking a little like a homebrew DynaTAC 8000X, the brushed aluminum and 3D-printed ABS case sports an unusual front panel feature – a working rotary dial. Smaller than even the Trimline phone’s rotating finger stop dial and best operated with a stylus, the dial translates rotary action to DTMF tones for the Feather FONA board inside. Far from a one-trick pony, the phone sports memory dialing, SMS messaging, and even an FM receiver. But most impressive and mysterious is the dial mechanism, visible through a window in the wood-grain back. Did [Mr_Volt] fabricate those gears and the governor? We’d love to hear the backstory on that.

This isn’t the first rotary cell phone hybrid we’ve featured, of course. There was this GSM addition to an old rotary phone and this cell phone that lets you slam the receiver down. But for our money a rotary dial cell phone built from the ground up wins the retro cool prize of the bunch.

[via r/Arduino]