This one's for the home crowd, because barely anyone outside of Austria will be able to read this clock anyways. It shows the time in the most elegant styrian dialect, rounding to the nearest five minutes (because who needs to know the exact time anyways?). The E-Paper display makes it look like every time was printed on a sheet of paper and the wooden frame makes the whole thing into a nice decorative piece. Now for sale on request.
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Inside, there's an Arduino Nano, an RTC clock module and an E-Paper display. I really learned a ton on this project, starting with low-power operation and PCB design for the hardware, font rendering and image compression (the Arduino's flash storage is filled up to 98% just by the character data), and finally about supply chains and "mass" production.
Clocks are hard to read - every child knows that. How are you supposed to find out what time it is from a few letters - or worse: clock "hands"? But this lightclock comes to the rescue: With its elegant design and in beautiful styrian dialect it shows the time in easily readable text form. By the way: you won't have to set the time yourself thanks to its radio clock receiver.
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Under the hood you'll find an Arduino Nano which reads and parses the time signal of a DFC77 antenna. Once it knows the exact time, the correlating LEDs light up to show the time "sentence". To conserve space on the Arduino, every pin can turn on two different clusters of LEDs, depending on whether it is set to 'High' or 'Low'. Three diffusion layers out of an old LCD screen soften the light and spread it out from single points.
Do you like kid's toys, but don't want to put up with the hassle of operating them yourself? Do you feel like autonomous weapons systems are way too far in the future? Then this project is just the thing for you: This foam dart shooter aims at people's heads all by itself and opens fire as soon as the opportunity arises!
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A camera that's mounted to the front of the gun sends a video feed to a computer running an OpenCV face detection algorithm. If it finds a face, it sends that information to an Arduino, where it should point the Nerf, which it does with two servo motors - one for up-down and another for left-right movement. As soon as the gun is aimed properly, a relais pulls the trigger and fires away! See it in action
What does a programmer do with a task that takes more than 30 minutes to complete? They spend the next hour automating the solution! So here's what i did when i was faced with the burden of having to walk all the way to my light switch to operate it: I bolted a servo to the wall, hooked a microcomputer up to it and developed an Android application. All so I can turn my light on and off from my phone.
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The app communicates with a Tornado-Server running on a Raspberry Pi, which in turn moves the Servo in the proper direction. The app provides a so-called 'quick setting', which can be placed in the top dropdown bar for easier access.
The name's the game: The most useless of all inventions has only one lever to turn it on. As soon as it's turned on, the device turns itself off again. With its rather good-looking appearance, it makes for an interesting, yet totally useless decorative piece.
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Inside the box you can find an Arduino, a 5V battery, a relais and a servo. Flipping the lever to 'On' sends a current to the relais, turning on the Arduino. The Arduino keeps the Relais open with another lead for as long as the servo arm needs to turn the lever off and return. As soon as the arm is back in its box, the Arduino closes the relais, cutting off its own power supply. Because of this, this box uses no electricity at all when it's not powered on! See it in action