Awesome:
Charilecube by Asher Glick
Monthly Archives: January 2013
Spycam with Arduino / Digispark
This is my first real project with the Digispark.
My son made a bird feeder at school and every now and then we could spot a bird eating on our balcony. I thought that would be cool to make photos of the birds stopping by.
Somehow we would have to detect when something comes/flies by. This is done using the PIR motion sensor. But apart from that, Digispark should also trigger after a defined interval, like making a foto every 5 minutes for some nice time lapse movies. I actually added a 1k potentiometer with which we can adjust the delay between two photos between 30 secs and 10 minutes. Setting the poti value in the middle Digispark would trigger a photo every 5 mins.
I bought myself a spycam on ebay:
HC-SR501 passive infrared sensor with Arduino
Got myself a HC-SR501 passive infrared sensor from ebay for less than 5€.
As information about this sensor is hard to find but usage is pretty easy I thought I share my findings.

HC-SR501: Left poti is to adjust sensitivity. I have set it to medium. Right poti is to adjust the delay. I set it to minimum which means it triggers about every 5 seconds.

On the bottom are the connections for 5V (left), signal (middle) and GND (right). I tried around with the jumper on the top right, but couldn’t really tell a different behaviour.
I thought the signal pin delivers an analog value according to the distance so I added a LED to pin 11 for the output. This was the initial setup:
#define pir A0 #define led 11 void setup() { pinMode(pir, INPUT); pinMode(led, OUTPUT); Serial.begin(9600); } void loop() { int i = analogRead(pir); int l = map(i,0,1023,0,255); Serial.print(i); Serial.print(" / "); Serial.println(l); analogWrite(led, l); delay(100); }
I realized that the value I was reading at the sensor pin was always around 680 not matter what.
I then went on to change analogRead to digitalRead:
#define pir A0 #define led 11 void setup() { pinMode(pir, INPUT); pinMode(led, OUTPUT); } void loop() { digitalWrite(led, digitalRead(pir)); delay(100); }
And it worked too… but I think going forward I will use analogRead and will react to motion once the value delivered by the PIR is higher than 500.
Make LED Flowers
RGB Lamp
MADE(by)FRUTOS has designed and programmed a beautiful RGB lamp.
What I especially like is that it involves woodworking and programming… my favorites 🙂
With this post I launch my new category “Todo pile”. Whenever I come across interesting projects on the I’ll mark them with this category for further reference.
Pinoccio
This is tempting. Arduino compatible with battery and radio for 49$. Make that 99$ and you can connect to the web through WiFi.
Pinoccio – IndieGogo Campaign Pitch from Sally "Fixpert" Carson
Digispark!
Another project I backed on Kickstarter: Digispark.
They arrived today – along with some proto and RGB shields. I soldered the headers and a RGB shield and uploaded the DigisparkRGB sketch that came with the Arduino 1.0.3 IDE… woohooo. More to follow soon 🙂
ZERO TO MAKER: A Re-Skilling Guide for New Makers
Balance board
Here some photos from a project I did a few months ago:
- Balance board 1
- Balance board 2
- Balance boards
- Balance boards
- Balance boards
- Balance boards side
- Wooden semisphere
Unfortunately I didn’t have any camera available in my workshop so there are only pictures of the finished boards. I used plywood for the platform. I created myself a sliding carriage to attach a router to it to mill the form.
To find a wooden semi sphere was a hard task. I could not find any (affordable) one with a diameter > 40mm. I ended up buying a semi sphere off ebay that originally was intended as a coordination toy. It had a diameter of 140mm.