Here is a little short video I shot this morning of my bird feeder.
Spring is coming and the birds are back. AND hungry!

My friend "Charley the Ghost".

Halloween is coming up.... So I decided to make a scary ghost decoration patterned off an article that appeared in Nuts&Volts magazine, Oct issue. The project is a cut out display that has movement and sound and light. A small child walks to the door and a light goes on, the ghost waves his arms and a spooky voice  warns of goblins and spiders. 

I made him from a piece of foam core board, two servo motors, a sound circuit and super brite LED and a PIR (Passive Infra-Red) movement detector triggered from a knock off Aruduino UNO board. When the PIR sensor is triggered by any warm blooded creature, the ghost springs to life all powered by a solar powered battery. Well, a 12 volt Solar powered and a small 9 volt battery. It was fun to make and the programming gave me some unforseen challenges to contend with. I think I will make some more of these for Christmas. Here are some pics of the proto-type. 

Above you can see the "Guts" of the ghost. At top is a four channel relay, the middle section is a bread board and at the bottom is the Arduino Uno. You can just make out the servo behind the Arduino and the one at far left bottom of picture.

You can see the sound board dangling as it fell down right before the shot was taken. I had an old speaker laying around salvaged from an old boom box with no housing or cover. I used a card board box that a clock came in to act as a speaker cabinet. I cut a hole in the bottom of the ghost and glued the "Speaker Box" in from behind.

His name is "Charley"  :)

Here is an early video of Charley in action.

Nikon IR Remote with a Mini Pro.

I got a new toy today. I ordered a PIC Development board and a few extra PIC chips. They came today, but I have not had a chance to play with any of it yet. I have been busy with other projects which I will post on later. One of the projects is a Infrared remote shutter for my Nikon D90. It works well, but I would like to increase its range a little bit. I used an Arduino Mini Pro for this one. Here is a pic of it on the bread board....

Once I had the circuit working I tried to make it smaller. Here is a pic me testing it in action.."Click", it works!

So I added the Mini Pro and changed some resister values to increase the IR LED strength. I am having some trouble trying to find a decent case to contain it. The ones I have found are way to expensive. The cheapest one I found was using an electrical box and lid. They make the boxes out of plastic which makes it easy to rout out or drill holes for wires and such. Below are some pics with the Mini Pro on it.

 Above you can see the IR LED sticking out. This shoots a beam like light that MUST be pointing at the FRONT of the Nikon D90. The "spread" of light from this LED is narrow and pointing at the camera takes some practice. In these photos I had a button right between the IR LED pins that triggered the circuit and a red led that lit up to tell me when the IR led was firing. This was very helpful as you can't see IR light with your eyes at all.

Here it is trimmed down a little more. Replaced the button with a bigger one.

Code and wiring diagram will be posted if there is ANY interest.

TED: Ideas worth spreading.