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Showing posts from May, 2024

Making Minimal Mechanical Digital Clock

Making Minimal Mechanical Digital Clock New devices are so much fun to build or use. Lately been motivated by interesting designs from around the Internet and building time counting/displaying devices are an obsession, as they are more useful than just showing some irrelevant counter, been building quite a few clocks. ThingSurfing led me again to Thingiverse and I came across this  Minimal Mechanical Digital Clock Seems like the maker Shiura is also obsessed with making various "time machines" (clocks). But there is an interesting mechanical and digital interface to all these devices, which is unique and provides a new angle to time. It was 3D printed and mechanically well designed enough not to need any changes. Used the standard code provided. Though this code runs on a network connected microcontroller, was able to get this working on an Arduino with manual setting of time. The ESP was not able to drive the motor well. Maybe an issue with the power supply. Need to check th...

Leg Brake for a Bicycle

Leg Brake on a Bicycle  Growing up, there was a need to learn how to drive a geared motor cycle and also get a driver's license. There are two categories of two wheeler licenses: one for geared vehicles usually with leg brakes and one for auto/non-geared vehicles where the braking happens by hand and are simpler to operate. Driving license had already been acquired for the non-geared vehicle but due to lack of availability of a geared vehicle for practice, the acquiring of this license was taking quite some time. The main problem was adapting to braking a vehicle using the leg where one to respond differently and the conditioning takes some time. Unfortunately could not manage to get anybody/s vehicle for learning after many attempts. And at that time (1995 or so) bicycles were rather common and used for transport. So an idea was: why not add such a feature to a bicycle. A Hercules Town and Trek was also available. After some visits to the local bicycle shop and a used vehicle part...

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Making PlotClock

Building the PlotClock by Joo from ThingiVerse  with English Character support Plotters are fun things. One can move in a 2D space and do very interesting things. Been fascinated by plotters from a long time. Notable mentions like the Drawbot, AxiDraw, EggBot, etc. Always wanted to build a small inexpensive one which did not require too many components or a lot of domain knowledge. One of my favourite past-times is to ThingSurf ie check which open source designs are available and try to make them, either on Thingiverse or Printables, etc. Its a lot of fun and because these provide designs for real-world things,  one can study and learn from them and also extend them to do other things. There is also a requirement of a device that will be a low-power notice board, like a limited power device that will just consume power for a short time, do some useful work, maybe display a message and go back to sleep. Things written on a sheet of paper remain visible for a long time. So it wo...

RGB Dot Matrix Display as Multi-Function Panel Display

PxMatrix on ESP8266 connected to an 32x16 RGB DOT MATRIX 1/8 SCAN Panel It was always wonderful to see the numerous colour displays that display messages and animations on Dot Matrix Displays (DMD) in the commercial places. One useful thing would be to take an Off-the-Shelf Display and run fully controllable custom software rather than rely on some external products to do. Luckily found a display vendor who offered to give me some DMD as samples for experimentation. I was given a P10 32x16 pixel color DMD panel. I have experimented with Monochrome DMDs (maybe blog about this later) but the RGB display is another world all together. The Monochrome world does not have lot of open source software, the RGB world has PxMatrix, RGBMatrix and SmartMatrix. As I wanted the controlling entity to be super cheap which meant use of an 8266 I had to start with PxMatrix. Though there are better options than PxMatrix, the others use a more expensive controller. Its better to start with the lowest cost...

Solving the Case of an Untraceable Car Owner

Photo by Dhiva Krishna on Unsplash It is both fun and pain to have an independent house. As much as there is freedom from a few things like nagging floor mates or just too many people around, there is also a pain to watch out for ourselves all around the house/neighbourhood. Houses used to be independent ones in the "golden" days where people would still live like Kings.  One such problem of such a house is parking space around the house and more so if the house is adorned by many open road corners which means more places to watch out for. People generally just thrust their responsibility on others and suddenly there is a new car in one of the empty places around. If the parking is transitory then it is kinda OK, say park for a short while and then move on. But nothing is known of such cars, they could be stolen, there could be people staying in them, any other activities, etc. So it is a headache if such a thing happens. One can call the police to solve the problem but i...