Category Archives: timer

Minimal Blinky Project Makes The Chip The Circuit Board

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We’ve got a thing for projects that have no real practical value but instead seek to answer a simple yet fundamental question: I wonder if I can do that? This dead-bug style 555 blinky light is one of those projects, undertaken just to see how small a circuit can be. Pretty small, as it turns out, and we bet it can get even smaller.

[Danko]’s minimal circuit is about as small as possible for the DIP version of the venerable 555 chip. The BOM is stripped to the bone: just the chip, three resistors, a capacitor, and an LED. All …read more

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Launching Fireworks with Raspberry Pi this Fourth of July

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It’s that time of year again in the United States, and the skies will soon be alight with pyrotechnic displays, both professional and amateur. Amazing fireworks are freely available, sometimes legally, sometimes not. For the enthusiasts that put on homebrew displays, though, the choice between watching your handiwork or paying attention to what you’re doing while running the show is a tough one. This Raspberry Pi fireworks show controller aims to fix that problem.

[netmagi] claims his yearly display is a modest affair, but this controller can address 24 channels, which would be a pretty big show in any neighborhood. …read more

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Battery-Powered Watering Timer Converted to Solar on the Cheap

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Watering the garden or the lawn is one of those springtime chores that is way more appealing early in the season than later. As the growing season grinds along, a chore that seemed life-giving and satisfying becomes, well, just another chore, and plants often suffer for it.

Automating the watering task can be as simple as buying a little electronic timer valve that turns on the flow at the appointed times. [A1ronzo] converted his water hose timer to solar power. Most such timers are very similar, with a solenoid-operated pilot valve in line with the water supply and an electronic …read more

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Learning The 555 From The Inside

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One way to understand how the 555 timer works and how to use it is by learning what the pins mean and what to connect to them. A far more enjoyable, and arguably a more useful way to learn is by looking at what’s going on inside during each of its modes of operation. [Dejan Nedelkovski] has put together just such a video where he walks through how the 555 timer IC works from the inside.

We especially like how he immediately removes the fear factor by first showing a schematic with all the individual components but then grouping them …read more

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Push Big Red Button, Receive Power.

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As with the age-old panic after realizing you have left an oven on, a candle lit, and so on, a soldering tool left on is a potentially serious hazard. Hackaday.io user [Nick Sayer] had gotten used to his Hakko soldering iron’s auto shut-off and missed that feature on his de-soldering gun of the same make. So, what was he to do but nip that problem in the bud?

Instead of modding the tool itself, he built an AC plug that will shut itself off after a half hour. Inside a metal project box — grounded, of course — an ATtiny85 …read more

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Don’t Miss the Bus: A One-Day Build

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Sometimes the most satisfying hacks are those that spring from a situation where resources are limited, either by choice or by chance. Constraints tend to stir the creative juices.

Serial Hackaday poster [limpkin] limited himself to a one-day build with what he had on hand for this bus-route countdown timer. Full points for actually building something useful, and extra credit for making something to keep his wife from being late for work.

The principle is simple: scrape a web page to find out how much time is left before either of two busses leaves his wife’s stop, and display the …read more

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Don’t Miss the Bus: A One-Day Build

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Sometimes the most satisfying hacks are those that spring from a situation where resources are limited, either by choice or by chance. Constraints tend to stir the creative juices.

Serial Hackaday poster [limpkin] limited himself to a one-day build with what he had on hand for this bus-route countdown timer. Full points for actually building something useful, and extra credit for making something to keep his wife from being late for work.

The principle is simple: scrape a web page to find out how much time is left before either of two busses leaves his wife’s stop, and display the …read more

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Push Button, Receive Beverage!

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Here’s a rec-room ready hack: an automatic drink dispenser.

[truebassB]’s dispenser operates around a 555 timer, adjusted by a potentiometer. Push a button and a cup pours in a few seconds, or hold the other button to dispense as much as you want.

The dispenser is made from MDF and particle board glued together, with some LEDs and paper prints to spruce it up. Just don’t forget a small spill sink for any miscalculated pours. You needn’t fret over the internals either, as the parts are easily acquired: a pair of momentary switches, a 12V micro air pump, a brass …read more

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Your Puzzle’s Done When The Electronics Says So

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We can race against the clock when assembling jigsaw puzzles online but what about competing against each other in the real world? [HomeMadeGarbage] came up with the simplest of solutions with his jigsaw puzzle timer that stops only when the puzzle’s completely assembled.

His simple solution was to attach copper foil tape to the back of the pieces, with overlap. He did this in a serpentine pattern to ensure that all pieces had a strip of the tape. The puzzle he used comes with a special container to assemble it in. At two corners of that container, he put two …read more

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Building an OBD Speed Pulse: Behold the ICE

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I am a crappy software coder when it comes down to it. I didn’t pay attention when everything went object oriented and my roots were always assembly language and Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS) anyways.

So it only natural that I would reach for a true In-Circuit-Emulator (ICE) to finish of my little OBDII bus to speed pulse generator widget. ICE is a hardware device used to debug embedded systems. It communicates with the microcontroller on your board, allowing you to view what is going on by pausing execution and inspecting or changing values in the hardware registers. If you …read more

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