Thanks to Mike for sending in his German Word Clock. He has used some SPI controlled RGB lighting strips to make wiring and controlling the lights simpler. So that the letters look good he has built and installed an MDF baffle with 100 light holes in it. 

 ”To control the clock, an ATmega8535 is used. This is a real-time clock (DS1307), a Bluetooth module and a Darlington array to control the 4 leds around the clock, each of which represents the minutes (Example: The Time Clock “It’s five after two” and two LEDs lights -> Thus, it is seven to two).

- 40 × 40 cm, so that you can read the clock at a distance greater good

- Mirrored glass front panel or Plexyglas

- “Wooden Shield” of the light cone to prevent unwanted light from letters

- To clean aluminum frame around edges have

- RGB lighting

- Brightness sensor

- Control by smartphone”

Who says The Clapper is old technology? Pete Mills blows off the dust from the vintage tech and breaths new life into the idea. The new Clever Clapper uses Claps and Laser Beams to control the Lights!

 ”In my version of the clapper if you clap twice within one second, the circuit toggles the lamp output.  On becomes off and vice versa. If you clap three times within one second, the lamps begin dimming up and down via PWM until a fourth clap is detected or a one minute timeout occurs, whichever comes first.  The brightness value is then stored and restored for subsequent toggling of the lights on/off with the two clap event.  I also added a relay output to turn on and off the moon lamp.  To trigger this relay, you shine a laser beam at the circuit to toggle it.  Laser beams begets moon beams. “

James Burton from XRobots.co.uk has sent in the latest progress on his Bipedal Dynamic Stability Testing. Looks to be moving along very well.

“It’s about half the height of an average person and I built all the parts from scratch with hand tools. It’s basically intended as a development platform so I have some more to build and some more experiments to do, but I’m at the stage where I have dynamically stable walking using R/C style heading gyros intended for use with R/C helicopters. The whole thing is currently controlled with a single Picaxe-18X micro controller.”

 When I was living the cubicle like it sometimes seemed what time either flew by or slowed to a crawl. This Capricious Clock by our friend Pete Mills makes the second hand move in some strange ways which makes it makes the seconds tick by the way time sometimes feels.

 ”The code keeps track of the 1pps pulses coming from the quartz clock movement, it delays for a random period of time then moves the second hand.  If the “Real Time” elapsed is greater than the displayed time the program will delay anywhere from 1-0.125s to catch up to the “Real Time”.  If the display time is faster, the program will select a random time from 1-8s to slow down so that “Real Time” can catch up.”

Dave Molmen has sent in the picture build log of his custom Exuberant Clock. The clock concept is very interesting. The center of the clock slowly rotates, to read the time all you need to do is see which slot the brass circle is in, this is the hour representation and what minute indication it is beside. The clock face moves the brass indicator across the minute number one per minute and when the full hour has expired the clock advances to allow the time indicator to slide into the next hour indication. Thanks to Dave for turning to the Gear Clock kit electronics as the base electronics controller for this clock. Since this clock doesn’t operate in the same way the Gear Clock did some custom firmware was needed. 

Check out this Smartphone controlled Remote Dog Feeder, it is powered by the Avnet Spartan-6 LX9 that was designed and built by Kevin Keryk, an Avnet engineer. It is build on a wood frame with a battery power supply which is housed in an Altoids tin. The batteries power the Spartan-6 LX9 board and a Digilent PMODCon3 Board. An Ethernet cable plugs the Spartan-6 controller into a port on a router to allow the system to have remote access. A servo is controlled by the Digilent board and this is what actually causes the food to be dispensed. A simple command can then be initiated by a remote device to actuate the servo and feed the dog!

We have seen some other automatic pet feeders in the past. If you are hooked on this one and want to give it a try you can refer to this Avnet reference design.

 Via: HG Forum

Check out this new robotic car that has been developed in France by the team from IFSTTAR and the Embedded Electronic Systems Research Institute at ESIGELEC. The goal of the two groups is to develop an autonomous car which would help us be safer in our cars. Researchers can control the car speed and its trajectory through an on-board computer system. The researchers drives the car with the help of a joystick, the group modified a Renault Grand Espace by adding robotic driver sensors, camera and control bay on roof.

Via: ieee Spectrum

“There are three cameras to monitor the vehicle’s surroundings and one forward-facing used to track road lanes and markings. A LIDAR unit at the front detects other cars and pedestrians.”