FLORA

I’m starting to experiment with FLORA from Adafruit and clothing.
The platform is easy to use so far, but for some reason I have to unplug it from my computer and plug it back in before a sketch will upload.

The idea here is to use a light sensor to turn on an LED in the suit jacket pocket when it is dark outside.  Potentially I might put more LEDs under the collar.

Some random thoughts or ideas in this vein. Can you use snaps as an on/off switch?  Can zippers conduct electricity and if so, can they be used as switches as well?  How about metal buttons? Assuming you can by waterproof LED strips, how about making a bicycle turn signal jacket with buttons / activators in the garment cuff?  Or a running jacket that lights up at dusk so drivers and other people can more easily see you? How do you make any of this removable so the garment can be washed?

Another vein would be to include GPS and Adafruit does make a GPS sensor for use with FLORA.  We especially like the No Place Like Home Shoes.  The GPS is activated by a heel click and indicates the way home through LEDs.

Mood Light

I still had a TLC5940 chip from an older project and wanted to make a  simple mood light with some RGB LEDs. This light has 3 colors plus off. Of course you can add more coloring mixing and other changes to the different modes instead of just one color.

Air Quality Egg

Finally received my Kickstarter backed Air Quality Egg.  This project uses an Arduino like board to measure the temperature, humidity, carbon monoxide (CO) and nitrogen dioxide(NO2).

You have one egg shaped device that is your base station and hooks up to your internet router.  The second egg shaped sensor you hang outside and it contains all the sensors that measure your air quality.

The data is uploaded to Cosm.com.  You can see my feed at https://cosm.com/feeds/96118.  Right now you need to look at the data on Cosm, but eventually they will have a cool website called airqualityegg.com

There currently is a known issue with the temperature reading as it won’t give negative numbers.  This has been fixed in the software, but you need to download it and then reload software onto both your base station and your sensor station.   See the Wicked Device forum for details.  I am waiting for someone else to try this first before I try to fix my setup.

All in all, a pretty easy setup and a nice job done by the folks behind this.  I can’t wait to see what people do with the data.

Clock

Clock Front

I just finished making a clock for my work area using a 7 segment display,   RTC (real time clock) and the RTC library.  The nice thing about using this RTC is that it has a backup battery so if you lose power, it still maintains the time.

I already had a standalone Arduino not being used, so I just used that. The code could use some work, but it works for now.

Fairly easy setup.  Both the RTC and the 7 segment display use 12c to communicate with the Arduino.  Because they have different addresses this is ok.  Adafruit has this handy chart of a lot of sensors and things and what their addresses are.    The 7 segment display I used has an address of 0×70 and that is not yet on the chart, but can be found in the library RTClib.

If I ever get a 3D printer, this would be a good project to make a case for.

Mastermind Update

This project is taking a little longer than I thought. Added a button and LCD screen and have most of it working. Now trying to get it all to fit into an old cigar box. I think I will leave the sides of the box alone, but will probably decorate the top somehow.

Rolling Bridge

A little off topic here, but recently I was in London and saw the amazing rolling bridge. This is a really neat feat of mechanical engineering.

The bridge uses hydraulics to roll up on itself so a boat can go into the waterway and turn around or stop and unload cargo.
More info here heatherwick.com/rolling-bridge/

Rolling Bridge from todd on Vimeo.

Arduino, TLC5940 & PN532 NFC/ RFID Shield

TLC5490

I’m finally getting somewhere with the Mastermind project.

I discovered that creating tones was effecting Pin 3 on the Deicimilia, which is used for the TLC5940, so I switched to using an Arduino Mega 2560. Of course the pins on a Mega are different from a Diecimilia, so I had to work that out too.

I created this little chart of what pins go where when from the TLC5940 to the Deicimilia & Mega 2560 I currently have.  Click on it to make it bigger.  Remeber you need to use the TLC5940 library with this.

The basic game play will be as follows.  Turn the game and and the LEDs light up in a particular pattern then they turn off.

The Arduino picks a random color for each of 4 LEDs.

You have a limited number of turns to guess this what color each LED is.  You select one color for each of the 4 LEDs per turn as your guess.  This is done buy selecting an RFID tag and waving it over the appropriate place.  Each tag will be labelled with a different color.

The game will tell you if you have any correct guesses and if any of them are in the correct place by lighting up the remaining LEDs as indicators.  Keep guessing until you get it right or run out of turns.

Of course I will need to make a nice case for it, probably out of an old cigar box, and still need to add an LCD screen.  Currently instructions and game play is being printed to the serial monitor.

See my previous post Mastermind Game Idea.

Also see the  Arduino Playground TLC5940 post and more helpful TLC5940 advice from tronixstuff.