Software user

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With the new ESP8266 module, adding WiFi to any Arduino project became a lot cheaper. This module has a serial interface; therefore it only requires connecting 4 pins: Tx, Rx, 3V3 and Ground, as shown in this image. A few peculiar facts about ESP8266: default serial baud rate is 57600; since this rate is too high for SoftwareSerial library, a hardware port should be used; requires 3V3 for power and level shifting for Rx signal (5V to 3V3); physical interface is a 2x4 pin male header; firmware can be upgraded to a version that allows 9600 baud rate; can be used either as client or server. The first two characteristics makes it a perfect candidate for a module with an XBee footprint, as is WiFly , for example. It took me about half an hour to do it, following these steps. cut a piece of 2-mm perfboard to the XBee dimensions; solder two 10-pin the 2-mm-spaced male headers on the sides; desolder (using wick) the 2x4 header; mechanically attach the header-less ESP8266 module to the XBee p...

My investigation into the failure of the M4 receiver remote controlling my Wise Clock 4 concluded with the need to add a step-up converter. The Sure 1632 display makes the input voltage drop sometimes below the absolute minimum of 4.5V required for the M4 module to work properly. It's not the noise (spikes) in the 5V power, nor the interference on 315MHz. I designed a simple " M4 receiver backpack " that uses a DC-DC step-up converter to ensure a 5V power for the M4 receiver module. The board supports 2 different kinds of converters, one from ebay (red in the photo below), the other from tindie (made by BBtech, black in the photo). The backpack can be used, by default, without the step-up converter if the voltage is steady at around 5V. (A trace-jumper must be cut when a converter is added.) The wireless remote pair of 4-key fob transmitter and receiver module is sold by Adafruit or vendors on ebay. The assembled board wired to Wise Clock 4 is shown in the photos be...

Once again, Sure Electronics modified their 32x16 3mm LED display, and this time not only cosmetically. The two 16-pin shrouded male connectors have been replaced with 10-pin connectors. And the worst thing is that the display now requires 12V for power! Maybe these new displays are intended for use in vehicles powered by 12V batteries. Or maybe designers thought a 12V power source is easier to access than a 5V one. In any case, the display has an on-board DC-DC switching regulator (with XL4013 ) to make the required 5V. For someone who needs to replace the older model with the new one, the immediate consequences are: the connector between the driver board (e.g. Wise Clock 4 ) and the display won't work; connections must be re-wired, probably using an adapter cable; either supply 12V to the board through the connector, or hack the display by soldering the 5V wire directly to the board (see the photos); the holes won't align anymore. The good news is that the display is electric...

New software for the Bubble clock from MikeM: I have the bubble LED shield working with the DS1337 RTC & LiPo shield.  I have it alternating the display with the battery voltage every 2 seconds right now.  I don't have a voltmeter handy, so I haven't verified what is displayed with actual voltage.  It started fully charged at 4.2v and has now dropped to 4.1v.  It should start blinking at 3.45v, and go to sleep at 3.3v. I started with your original bubble sketch from the blog posting, but then had to remap all the display pins from the schematic.  The current version of the SevenSeg library doesn't match your code, so I had to make some adjustments. I also changed the SevenSeg library code to even out the brightness.  It looped through all the segments and turned on each appropriate digit, then delayed and turned everything off. I changed it to loop through all the digits, turning on each appropriate segment.  Once all th...

I could have added a second bubble LED display to my "bubble clock" by connecting the anodes for the 4 new 7-segment digits to the only 4 pins left available: D0, D1, A6 and A7. Instead, I preferred to use the expensive ($8+) LED driver MAX7219 . Luckily, I got mine a long time ago as free sample from Maxim, and this was my chance to use it. As one can expect, the "double bubble" clock can display the seconds, plus the date and day of the week. Below are the 2 bubble clock versions side by side. Both are ProMini shields, so ProMinis get plugged on their backs. I designed them to stand by themselves with the electronics exposed and on the open, as shown in this post . I am not sure if this is a good idea, but designing (or finding) an enclosure seems even a bigger challenge. The sketch, included below, uses the LedControl library (communicates with MAX7219 through SPI). #include "LedControl.h" #include "Wire.h" #include "DS1307.h" #defi...

This large 2.42" OLED I2C module can be used as a replacement for the smaller 0.96" display for which I originally designed the ProMini OLED clock shield . It is built around the same SSD1306 chip, and it only comes in yellow (for now). MikeM wrote this great Pacman clock sketch for it (available for download here ), shown in the video below. To display on the OLED, Mike used U8glib graphic library. Initially tested on the 0.96" OLED, the sketch froze after some time, for a yet to be explained reason. The same sketch works perfectly with the 2.42" display. Mike spent a lot of time trying to figure out if the culprit is software (bug in the U8glib) or hardware. (Any feedback on this issue is greatly appreciated.) The clock can also display the time as HH:MM:SS on the whole screen, as shown in the photo below, also courtesy of Mike. My next step would be to design an enclosure for it. For that I will probably need some more help :) Update Nov 29, 2014, from MikeM: ...