In this simple project MSP430 launchpad has been taken in to car race. Bluevault has sent us a short notice about his SLOT car lap time calculator based on MSP430 microcontroller.

Setup is very simple – cars are detected with reed switches under each track lane. Timer counts time and displays values on standard HD44780 LCD. Such small improvement pushes hobby in to new level.

Alarm clocks usually – ring a pair of bells, play jarring noise, imitate the cock a doodle do of a rooster what else? We have seen alarm clocks with radios, and Phones with alarm clocks but most of them [if not all] uses sound to wake you up – not really the most gentle way of waking someone up. What do we recommend?

The sunrise clock – instead of breaking your morning with a bunch of rings that also scares away a good start for your day this clock illuminates the surroundings giving a feel of morning sunrise in the comfort of your own room [yeap rain or shine]. Its build is quite straight forward – time was kept using a real time clock implemented using a STM32F100RB Arm Cortex M3 processor and a ceramic oscillator. Time is displayed using a pair of 8×8 LED matrices. The lamp [the source of light] is controlled using a dimmer circuit composed of an opto-diac and a triac – the opto – diac isolates the microcontroller from the high voltage AC source needed for the lamp while the triac controls how much of the AC wave is used to drive the lamp thus controlling the brightness. The clock also has ambient light detection which utilizes a photoresistor and an ADC channel in the STM32F100RB. Push buttons are used to adjust time, input alarm time and the duration of the lamps lighting. And when all else fail? It has a back up piezoelectric speaker to break eardrums!

Graduation only comes a few times on a man’s life – unless you decide to take up 40 courses [like a woman I saw on TV]. That’s why many graduating students tend to pick up the best dress, best shoes and even decorate the graduation gown and hat just to stand out in the midst of a large graduating crowd [where everybody looks the same] and embed themselves in the crowd’s memory. When deprived of the chance to shine, Victor found a neat way of embedding himself in people’s digital memory while still blending in. The key? Infrared lights! Infrared can’t be seen by the naked eye but ooh yes but! It can be seen/detected by digital cameras and camcorders.

Inconspicuous LED Graduation Hat from RazorCustom on Vimeo.

Victor put together infrared LEDs and placed them in ‘strategic’ locations [hat edges, gown buttons] – this is the blend in part. Using an ATMega168 to store and sequence a series of blinks, Victor was able to output “Congratulations Class of 2011” in morse code. Successfully embedding your embedded geeky signature in graduation pictures of others especially without anyone noticing is something you don’t usually get away with – congratulations!

Most people don’t realize it but the most comfortable part of the house is — surprise! The good old toilet. The king’s throne has been there for millennia yet we have seen very little electronics put into it – no pressure on toilet bowl developers. We have seen some with heaters and automated water sprinklers but this is the dawn of the internet age it’s time for the throne to evolve. The idea is to install a sensor to the toilet to keep track of the King’s daily bathroom habits and tweet it in twitter!

The project hardware is composed of an Arduino as the main processor, a parallax ultrasonic range finder, a few connecting wires, LEDs, a breadboard and an ethernet shield. Oh I forgot you also need a LAMPP enabled server. The ultrasonic range finder detects either the toilet cover or the person using the toilet – no contact more hygienic compared to the switch version [link: http://www.impactlab.net/2009/05/08/the-twittering-toilet/]. The signal from the range finder is fed to the Arduino which in turn utilizes the Ethernet shield to send tweets to your [or your toilet’s] tweeter account. Btw this is just the beginning – Mike Newell is posting more ways to smartify your home!