July 30, 2011

Android weather display

First step, grabbing data sent to Weather Underground from several of my SensorPacks. You’ll note the humidity sensor went out on one sensor, and the second is tracking a slightly higher than realistic humidity, compared to “03”, which is a reference commercial weather station I have. Next step will be a nicer graphical display, then a way to get data for SensorPacks that aren’t sending data to Weather Underground, likely via the network/bluetooth from a local PC that’s already gathering the data.

July 27, 2011

Sensor display on a TFT Touchscreen

Here’s a demo of data from the SensorPacks being displayed on a TFT Touchscreen/shield I picked up from Adafruit. Writing a simple UI via graphics primitives reminded me of building UI’s back in the day, where all you have are lines, circles, and x/y coordinates to play with. There wasn’t a lot of data space left over to build functionality, but I managed to get a quick-and-dirty analog clock, as well as the ability to store data for 4 individual SensorPacks.

July 11, 2011

LED strip project

Wired up an LED light strip I got from Adafruit, and tweaked the example software, here’s the result..

June 22, 2011

Big LED display in action

I realized I’d never gotten around to posting a picture or video of the display station actually working. I’ve had this running for nearly a year now, first on a breadboard, and then via the shift register circuit board I had made. I mounted the LED’s to some smoked plexiglass, then build a simple box to put the entire mechanism in. A single higher output 5V power supply attaches to the Arduino and to the LED’s providing sufficient current for everything.

August 22, 2010

LED Driver board

July 12, 2010

Multi-display weather monitor

July 4, 2010

Big LCDs and their Arduino pal

Bought these big 6.5″ LEDs from SparkFun, and using these TPIC6B595 shift registers, have it all running via an Arduino, with just 3 wires from the Arduino capable of running as many LEDs as I want. Wiring diagram and sample code coming soon, I want to clean it all up a bit. Grabbed several how-to’s off the internet, then tweaked them and the code so it all made more sense to me.

June 22, 2010

SensorPack PCBs arrived!

To make putting together the sensor breakout boards (for an SHT15 and SCP1000) and Arduino Fio easier, I used Eagle to design a simple circuit board, then used SparkFun’s great service, BatchPCB, to get the boards produced. I’m pretty happy with how they turned out, especially liked that I could easily make a “barn shaped” board by just laying down the outline. Noticed two things I’ll change in the next revision that would make it more flexible to use.

May 23, 2010

MakeFaire: TubeTime IEE clock

One of the neatest new projects I saw at the faire brought back memories of watching the Apollo missions in the 60’s. The iconic and unique IEE one-plane digital display unit. Had never seen one up close, and didn’t know how they worked. Found out that it’s a mini-projector with a set of curved lenses and individual light bulbs that project the numbers and decimal in the center on the screen.

May 17, 2010

Sensor pack prototype assembly