Inspired by Dan Aldred‘s LEGO Clock hacks (http://www.tecoed.co.uk/darth-beats.html and http://www.tecoed.co.uk/yoda-tweets.html) I picked up a broken Batman clock from eBay for some hacking shenanigans. I had several aims, based on the great work of Dan before me
A few days ago I caught wind of the #BringYourBuild competition being run by Maplin here in the UK. This was to celebrate the 11th burthday of the Arduino platform. All you needed was to submit an Arduino based project, either via social media or (preferably) in store. Continue reading
The blame for this little project can be firmly placed at the door of @SouthendRPiJams (aka Andy) after I signed up to be an Exhibitor at the Southend Raspberry Jam on 21st Feb. He dropped me a DM and the conversation went like this
SRJ:
We’re doing Astropi this jam but the HAT won’t be out. If you could show some of the equivalent AstroPi hardware and code working to help give people ideas, it would be greatly appreciated.
Cheerlights is a IoT based light control system, originally intended to allow social media to dictate the colour of festive lights around the world.
The current cheerlight status
Put the word Cheerlight and a colour in a tweet and you’ve just told light systems around the world the colour they should show. On the website is a list of the currently supported colours.
On the back-end there is a feed aggregator which exposes a JSON, TXT or XML API. Continue reading
A few days back I saw this article about a Word Clock that had been built using at ATmega328P and an 8×8 LED matrix. “Cool” I thought, I have bi-colour one of those in the “toy” box, I might have a go at that.
Around the same time, those pesky pirates Pimoroni were having their #yarrbooty twitter competition. I was fortunate enough to win a few rounds and decided to spend some of my booty on a Unicorn HAT and an A+. The Unicorn HAT is an 8×8 matrix of very bright RGB LEDs.
And low, the Unicorn Word Clock was born Continue reading