My Arduino page...

I have been working on a decorative lamp using the Neopixels from Adafruit.com. This is the frist version and has since been upgraded to version 2. This video shows only a small amount of the patterns I have made for it. The main lesson I learned during this build is that there is NO such thing as a "Small" project. (I will never say that again.)

I kinda went a little nuts with the new video editing software, but HEY, what the heck. If you cant go a little  nuts here, where can you?

Arduino UNO - MicroProcessor

My adventures with this COOL little Microprocessor!!! (Watch out 'Apple', we are coming for you!).

Garage Door 2.0
As I sat in my garage one day watching my mother who is in her 80's pull the car inside, I noticed she was having a bit of trouble judging if the car was pulled in far enough. She would pull in and using the on board camera in the car pull back out and try and guess if the car was in the correct spot. Well, I could have easily solved this problem by hanging a tennis ball from a string from the ceiling, but that would have been too easy. You know us Arduino people cant resist a challenge if it might entail actually using the Arduino! So I came up with this little design to solve the problem. Here I have used an Ultra-Sonic sensor and some LEDs with a LCD display and a speaker from an old PC and a limit switch. It works like this....When the garage door goes all the way up it triggers the limit switch which gives power to the ARDUINO and starts up the program. When the car pulls into the garage, the sonic sensor detects it and displays the distance on the LCD.  When the car is at a certain distance the GREEN LED lights up and as the car gets closer the YELLOW then RED LEDs light up. When the car is at the correct spot for parking the BLUE LED lights up. If the car is too close then the BLUE led flashes and the speaker sounds a series of beeps signaling the driver to backup until the BLUE LED is solidly lit. When the garage door is lowered all the way, the limit switch kills power to the ARDUINO and the cycle is complete. 

GarageDoor 2.0 wiring diagram

I had a lot of fun making this work and learned quite alot in the process. I may add a few more options to this as time goes by, but for now it will have to do.

Ok, off to the next project. :)

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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.