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Congratulations to harjinagi for Musical Card With Gyro Control LED's , jkutzsch for Holiday Special 20: The Learning Stone, wolfgangfriedrich for BulbDial - A Tale of a Sundial without the Sun , and bernhardmayer for SunPathClock! You have been gifted a $100 Shopping Cart from another member on Random Acts of Kindness Day!
Congratulations tohugohu forDog Shaped Arduinos. What could go wrong? You have been gifted a handheld USB Oscilloscope on Random Acts of Kindness Day!
In a tradition as long as the Holiday Special, every year we ask the winners of the year end competition to pick a member that they felt was deserving and didn't win, and gift them a $100 shopping cart. Oftentimes, members will do something unexpected and gift something more than that. In the past, we've done this on Valentine's Day. This year, we're doing it on the 15th 17th, which is Random Acts of Kindness Day. It seemed like an appropriate date for announcing the recipients of the gift to gives. Little did I realize, here in the US its President's Day, and we also have that day off! Nevertheless, I've found some time to make this announcement.
Each member who gifted a present receives a Heart Trophy, as does the member who receives the gift (the gifted?), to commemorate the occasion. We had some really cool projects during Holiday Special 20 but some of the projects during the Making Time really stood out. Everyone in the class of 21' for the gift to gives could have been a winner in their respective competitions.
On a cold and snowy Chicago day, looking back on a year most of us want to put behind us, here are some projects that are sure to warm you up!
Edit: Random Acts of Kindness Day is actually February 17th. :-)
Without further adieu here are your winners.....
Gifts to Give Winners:
robogary gifts a $100 Shopping Cart to harjinagi :
"I liked this project because it stuck to the theme and was original. A student would also get a very nice surprise for some electronic goodies." - robogary
Musical Card With Gyro Control LED's by harjinagi:
harjinagi made a greeting card especially for Holiday Special 20 which consisted of an MPU-6050MPU-6050 for controlling 3 LEDs on the card. The gyroscope is programmed to detect the tilt in the card and then turn on the respective tilted LED and ISD1820 a small Voice Recorder and Playback module that can do the multi-segment recording.application with the adjustment of the on-board resistor.
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"The Musical Card is Christmas oriented, and is well documented so that people can learn how to use gyroscope sensors for interactivity. The construction needs some improvement, but there is plenty of scope to personalize such projects." - Community Member Judge
"I like the way this brings people together for the holiday season. It's a fun project that everyone can take part in. This shows the meaning of the holiday season." - Community Member Judge
"Slightly unusual circuit - but there's no arguing with results!" - Community Member Judge
ralphjy gifts a $100 Shopping Cart to jkutzsch :
"I'd like to see as many individuals gifted as possible" - ralphjy
Holiday Special 20: The Learning Stone by jkutzsch:
You knew something with Baby Yoda had to show up somewhere in this announcement? Didn't you?
Around the various Holidays jkutzsch enjoys creating little projects that match the theme of that specific Holiday, Spooky around Halloween, Spring/Life around Easter, Hearts/Candy/Love around Valentines, Star Wars around May 4th, Winter/Christmas around Christmas, etc... For this project he tried to imagine something that wasn't limited to a season or a specific Holiday but more along the lines of Giving with the potential to continue giving throughout the year and into the future.
With his daugher, Makenna by his side for every episode of Mandalorian, like the rest us they have fallen in love with the little character formerly known as The Child, AKA Baby Yoda, now Grogu. In fact, his daughter's biggest desire for a Christmas present was a Baby Yoda, not an ugly one, but a cute one!
So of course now he was now intrigued in regards of how to tie this together into a Gift for his Daughter and a Project for E14. Thank you sharing your awesome holiday project with us jkutzsch ! I think I can speak on behalf the entire community and say this past season of the Mandalorian was epic!!!
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"The Learning Stone involved younglings getting involved with projects at Xmas, recycling older hardware, and The Mandalorian. It's great." - Community Member Judge
fmilburn gifts a $100 Shopping Cart to wolfgangfriedrich :
"As for the $100 gift to another member please award to Wolfgang Friedrich for BulbDial in Making Time." - fmilburn
BulbDial - A Tale of a Sundial without the Sun by wolfgangfriedrich:
When the Making Time competition started, wolfgangfriedrich's long-term memory forced his thoughts back into 2011 (sounds like a virtual time machine) when he was prototyping a sundial based on a regular clock movement and some LEDs, called a bulb dial.
It all started from a blog post with just a beautiful concept drawing at Ironic Sans (amazing the the blog is still up 13 years later). The idea is simple and elegant. 3 light sources circle a pin and cast shadows in different length for hours, minutes and seconds.
The idea of a bulb dial got picked up by several parties and got implemented with boatloads of static LEDs. First were the geniuses at Mad Evil Scientists. Other implementations can be seen from Solarbotics and Taufeeq.
The idea was cooking in his mind for some time until he had enough pieces of the puzzle solved to build a prototype in the spirit of the original concept. He needed a mobile means of power transfer between the different light levels. The solution was multiple disks of decreasing radius for hours/minutes, stacked on top of each other with a shadow casting pin in the center and LEDs of different heights at the edge of each disk. Energy transfer was done through concentric rings of conductive material on the lower level and spring loaded wiper contacts coming down from the upper level. Wires, LEDs and current limiting resistors were the easy part. LEDs had to be narrow beam types, additionally enclosed in heat shrink/tape to reduce stay light all over the place. In the true spirit of prototyping he used wobbly disks of cardboard, copper and aluminum tape and copper EMC finger gaskets. The clock movement was a continuous type with all arms running smooth in circles and not hopping from one second to the next. Contact was not perfect, so the LEDs went dim/off randomly, so he tried to improve contact resistance with solder and more conductive tape. In the end, he could prove the concept, but never got to a good enough prototype that he would put on the wall as a working timekeeping piece.
| BulbDial - A Tale of a Sundial without the Sun | |
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"This idea was not held back by a lack of production equipment as the builder just used cardboard, tape and paper to make the project and so is inspirational to the community. What he managed was to prove a very interesting concept for a different type of sundial." - Community Member Judge
Fred27 gifts a $100 Shopping Cart to bernhardmayer :
I pick bernhardmayer for his SunPathClock for the same reason I voted for his project when judging. "I liked this original idea for a clock display. I've seen moon phases before, but not the sun." - Fred27
SunPathClock by bernhardmayer:
Nowadays GNSS receivers are so cheap that you don't only use them for their actual task, positioning, but also for more trivial tasks like giving the time. This was done in the Self-adjusting clock with e-display project. The only downside of this is that the receiver somehow needs to receive signals from the satellites. So in basements or other covered places this won't work. But with more sensitive receivers this gets less a concern. Additionally when there is already a GNSS receiver in the system, you could also use it's positioning feature. One goal would be to show the times for sunrise and sunset. Another goal is to draw the position of the sun at the location of the clock. These dates highly depend on the position. So this is a perfect fit. And this is what bernhardmayer is going to show in his project.
His project is based on an Arduino MKR WiFi 1010. As GNSS receiver he uses the Adafruit Ultimate GPS Breakout. This is based on the MTK3339 chipset. As a display he used his ArduHMI shield which he already introduced in NFC-Badge - Update your badge with your smartphone - Design data of the HMI shield - Design data of the HMI shield . The latest version of the shield also has an Arduino MKR connector so it can be directly plugged on top of the Arduino MKR WiFi. The data of the HMI shield is available on github. The project is powered by an USB power bank.
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"I liked this original idea for a clock display. Ive seen moon phases before, but not the sun." - Community Member Judge
"Great design and a clever sun position concept makes for a truly unique timepiece. Well done!" - Community Member Judge
fmilburn Gifts a Handheld USB Oscilloscope to hugohu :
"As for my Holiday Special Tool Gift. I was thinking I would send the oscilloscope to Hugo Hu if he wants it. He stated in his Corgi Arduino PCB blog that he wanted one." - fmilburn
Dog Shaped Arduinos. What could go wrong? by hugohu :
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