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Category: Projects

Make your own Heart Keychain

Published 4. November 2017.

This one is a very simple but cool project, something that I would recommend to anyone who is interested into DIY electronics, gadgets and learning new stuff in general. It is definitely one of those projects that don’t require too much time but you can learn a lot by making it and also earn a lot of credit by sharing it with your friends and family.

Below you can see a final product. It’s a heart shaped, touch sensitive, keychain for your loved ones. On the front side there is a smiley face drawing that has eyes and mouth. Eyes have two red LEDs that will start to pulse once you touch the keychain or place you finger on the smiley face (see it in action below)

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DIY Wake-up Light – Wake-up easily and well restedDIY wake-up light hack

DIY Wake-up Light – Wake-up easily and well rested

Published 31. December 2016.

Theory behind this project

Another weekend project that I’ve been working on is Wake-up light. Lately I’ve been doing more research on sleep phases and how to “hack” your brain to wake-up more refreshed and adjust your sleep cycle. There are many studies out there explaining this and providing scientific evidence, so if this is something you are interested in, I encourage you to go and get more detailed information on this subject. However I won’t go into too much detail, I’ll just try to give very simple explanation: When you sleep, you are either in REM or deep sleep (NREM) phase. When you wake up in REM phase you feel fresh, relaxed and full of energy. When you are woken up during the deep sleep phase, you feel like you’ve just been hit by a bus, and you take long time to actually wake up.

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New project – Sensor board for smart home

Published 23. January 2016.

These PCB-s are a part of much bigger project that I am currently working on and I have been waiting for them waaaay too long. Boards are designed to house two I2C sensors, (almost any I2C sensor breakout board can fit onto dedicated headers), at the moment I am using Temperature+Humidity sensors, Pressure Sensors, Ambient Light sensors and few others on these boards. Also I am using PIC16F1829 microcontroller to do all the “magic” and nRF24L01+ for communication with the main unit that does storage, data analysis and communication with other parts of the project.

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USB Power supply Active Load Tester

USB Power supply Active Load Tester

Published 2. March 2015.

USB Power supply Active Load Tester or short PAL Tester is unit designed for testing the quality of the power supplies.
Idea was to create low-cost, precise device for simultaneous measurement of Voltage and Current drawn from the device under test. This is one of my weekend projects that I have decided to release to the public. All source files can be found on projects GitHub page.

Device Features:

  • Open Source and Open Hardware
  • Modular design, easy to understand and change/adapt to your needs
  • Uses widely available and off-the shelf components
  • Components Bill of Material is below $10
  • Integrated USB-to-Serial converter for easier interface with the device
  • API for communicating with PC
  • Recording Voltage vs Amps data and graphing the results
  • Easy to use
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Mini project: Heartbeat Keychain

Published 12. February 2015.

 

Heartbeat key-chain is intended to be a small gift that your loved one can carry with her/him wherever she/he goes.
Basically top side of the PCB is touch sensitive and has one RGB LED. When the exposed copper on the top side is touched, the microcontroller detects it and begins to pulse the LED in the heartbeat like pattern.

Bill of material, schematics and source code are available on GitHub.

I am posting render images of the PCB since I’m waiting for the Fab house to manufacture the boards for me.

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Build Small Bedroom Clock from scratch in under 4hours

Build Small Bedroom Clock from scratch in under 4hours

Published 12. July 2014.

First, maybe you should see a little demo on YouTube to see how this thing looks in action…

Before we start…

I wanted to make this project for myself, and since this is very simple project, I placed a challenge to complete it in shortest time possible and make it work as I intended to.
From idea to finished product it took about 4-5 hours, including designing schematic, routing PCB and making it, programming the device and etc.
What is important is that finished product works like I want it to do, and it could be used as opportunity to learn something about other platforms different from some that are spamming us 24/7 like Arduino.
Don’t get me wrong, Arduino is great and all but sometimes I want to build something for myself from scratch. 🙂

One thing I want to ask you all is to share your opinion, how to make this project better, what would you add/remove, did you use it? Did you like it? Did you make/modify it? Share it with us!

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