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What's missing from this picture (of a backyard hockey rink)? You got it (probably the post title helped too): a scoreboard. For those not familiar, a traditional one looks like in the photo below (click on it to see it bigger). It may look simple, but it provides a lot of functionality: display 2-digit home score; display 2-digit visitor score; countdown timer, with the starting time configurable/settable; timer displays mostly minutes and seconds, but under 1 minute, it displays seconds and tenths of a second; stop/resume the countdown; display round/period; number of periods is configurable/user-settable; buzzer sounding at the end of the round, game or on demand; penalty timers for up to four players (that also stop/resume with the main timer); functions as a clock when not used in a game. The control for the hockey scoreboard  is pretty complex too. The control console is usually wired to the scoreboard. Sometimes the console is detachable (brought in to the booth by the score

While cleaning up my desk, I found a little I2C module that I completely forgot about. It is a breakout for BMP180 barometer sensor, which I probably bought on ebay for a couple of dollars (I just checked , it is still under $2). This tiny board can be added literally to any Arduino clock to display atmospheric pressure, with the help of  Adafruit_BMP085 library . Connecting the barometer to Wise Clock 4 is trivial: I soldered wires directly to processor pins (SDA, SCL, VCC and GND), as shown in the photo. There is plenty of clearance between the board and the display. In the software, as mentioned, I used the Adafruit BMP085 library, which also covers the compatible BMP180. There is no extra setting required from the user: the pressure is displayed together with the temperature, and enabled/disabled from the TEMP+/- menus. Also, there is no extra settings when compiling/building: if the BMP180 module is not installed, no pressure data will be displayed. Essentially, the new code con

Hello Arduinians... Ever thought of detecting motion via your Arduino.... if yes, then this one's for you. In this tutorial, We're interfacing PIR sensor today with Arduino. Let's gets started! Block Diagram Block Diagram Components Required For This Tutorials 1 * Arduino Board 1 * PIR Motion Sensor(you can buy from here )   Breadboard Jumper wires Battery What is PIR motion sensor & how it works? Basically, a PIR stands for "Passive Infrared Sensor". The sensor works on the principle of infrared waves' detection those are being emitted by human bodies. They are undetectable to us but can be discovered by the devices designed for such special purposes. I'm going to go just a little deep, enough to make you understand the internal operation. When a body moves in front of a PIR sensor, the temperature of that place changes where the body has moved. If the body makes a further movement, the composition of infrared waves being received by the PIR from th

The latest release of the Wise Clock 4 software can be found here . It includes a few new features: support for the XBee-fied ESP8266 (from iteadstudio), courtesy of MikeM; The WiFi settings are configured in the SD card file message.txt , and they look like this: #### ESP8266 configuration # # Esp8266.ssid Wireless SSID to connect to # Esp8266.phrase pass phrase to use (WPA authentication) # Esp8266.sntp optional SNTP server IP address (not hostname) for time synchronization # Esp8266.rssurl optional URL of an RSS feed, like http://w1.weather.gov/xml/current_obs/KMYF.rss Esp8266.ssid   BELL475 Esp8266.phrase 7xyz1E9F6 Esp8266.sntp    Esp8266.rssurl  This feature is enabled in the code by the following line in file  UserConf.h : #define WANT_ESP8266 support for GPSBee  (from seeedstudio): only the minutes and seconds are set from the GPS data, the hours remain as set from the buttons; synchronization is performed once a day and/or when the clock is reset (powered off-on); To en

Arduino is very popular and easy to use. With Arduino, we can do lot's of projects and experiment. So today we add one more projects in our Arduino project list. In this article, we are going to make a digital voltmeter.using an Arduino board. In this project, we measure the input voltage range between 0 to 50V by using the voltage divider. It is very simple to use Arduino as a voltmeter. Arduino UNO has  5 analog pin to read the input analog value. If we have an idea about reference voltage then we can easily measure the input voltage. Here we will use 5V as a reference voltage. Block Diagram Block Diagram of DC Voltmeter Component Required  1 * Arduino Board(In this article we use Arduino UNO) 1 * LCD Module(Here we will use 16 * 2 LCD Module) 1 * 100K Resistor  1* 10K Resistor 1 * 5K Potentiometer Some jumper wires Breadboard  Circuit Diagram Circuit diagram of this projects is very simple and easy to understand. Here we use a 16 * 2 LCD module to display the voltage. Read this

With Arduino, almost everything seems to be too friendly when it comes to interfacing various sensors, shields, add-ons or any other utility devices. Just because the Arduino coding environment is so user-friendly, anyone can do it. So in this post, I will just show you how to hook up your sensors to Arduino and get them running. Let's start with the very basics.... Sensors What is Sensor Sensors are those electronic components which convert physical data into electronic data. This data is in analog format and is fed to the microcontroller on the Arduino board. The microcontroller has inbuilt ADCs (Analog-2-Digital Converter) which processes this data and converts it into digital format. And once you have received the (electronically converted) physical data, you can make your Arduino perform as you want. How To Interface LDR With Arduino Arduino Distance Measurement Using Ultrasonic Sensor On your Arduino board, there are analog pins named as A0, A1, A2, A3, A4, A5. The number of