Photons, Electrons, and Dirt

What if Hayes wasn’t the only tech company to build a clock? Here’s my take on a Linksys router clock.

In the early 1980s, Hayes made an external real-time clock styled after their ubiquitous Smartmodem 300. In this project, I explore what it would have looked like if Linksys had built a clock styled after their ubiquitous WRT-54G wireless router from the early 2000s. In the process, I’ll build a Wi-Fi connected, self-setting clock styled like a miniature Linksys WRT-54G wireless router and discover that Linksys products weren’t the first tech products designed to stack.

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An army of miniature traffic barrels waiting to assault your morning commute.

I designed a miniature traffic barrel with a blinking warning light then built a whole army of them to slow down traffic on my desktop. The warning light was a challenge because it has a lot of detail, it holds a real LED, and it’s quite small. After designing the barrel and warning light, I chose a PIC12F1612 8-pin microcontroller to make the LED blink. It requires fewer parts than a 555 timer circuit, uses less power, and the blink pattern is fully programmable. Read on to learn how to design a traffic barrel complete with a functioning, battery-powered warning light.

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The little gray box plays back sound effects triggered by the Launchpad Mini. It has a line-level output for input to mixer to use during live streams. There’s also a version with a built-in speaker for live in-person sound effects too!

In this project, I use an off-the-shelf MIDI controller to trigger an RP2040 to play out sound effects from a microSD card through an audio DAC and optional amplifier and speaker. Read through to see how to combine the RP2040’s USB host, FatFS, and I2S audio capabilities into a fun audio project and for all the build details!

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The completed LCD traffic signal including body, mast, controller cabinet with Wi-Fi antenna, concrete pedestal for the controller, and platform.

In this project, I build a miniature 3D-printed traffic signal and matching Wi-Fi-enabled controller cabinet. The big twist is that each light on the signal is really a small round LCD permitting traditional traffic signals like bicycles, globes, and arrows as well as random images to be displayed—without disassembling or taking apart the signal.

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A white Color Kinetics ColorBlast 4, a black Color Kinetics C200, and two super-colorful My First Neopixel dance party lights.

Inspired by various colorful and chonky kids toys and some old Color Kinetics architectural fixtures, this colorful Neopixel spotlight packs an Adafruit Sparkle Motion Mini into its base and can be controlled over Wi-Fi using your choice of development environments. Read on to learn how to 3D print and build your own to bring a bit of colorful light into your work or living space!

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A friend forwarded a video of the lizard slapping the lizard emoji on their phone and I instantly knew I needed to do the same! My phone doesn’t sound out emojis though so I built a single-purpose sound board that does one thing and one thing only: it says Lizard every time you press the button. Follow along to build your own using off-the-shelf electronics and some 3D printing!

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Tired of taking the trash out in the dark? Forgot to turn on the outside lights on the way to the trash cans? Read on to learn how I built a waterproof, battery-powered Zigbee hall-effect sensor to automatically turn on my backyard landscape lights when I open the gate to go into the backyard at night.

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Rinsing the bike off after a muddy night ride can be needed. Being able to see what you’re doing without getting your phone out or going inside the house is great.

Ever want to control some outdoor lighting without using your phone or going back in the house? Read on to see how I installed a set of landscape lights then built a set of outdoor, waterproof Zigbee buttons to control them using an nRF52840 module, Zigbee2MQTT, Python, and TinyTuya.

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Two XMCOSY+ RGBW light strings hanging in my backyard over my snow-covered lawn.

Two years ago, I hung a set of generic G50 RGB globe lights in the backyard. They weren’t exactly waterproof and the individual lights became water logged and started acting erratically. This year, I replaced them with two sets of XMCOSY+ RGBW Patio String Lights. The new XMCOSY lights look great and I like that there’s real white LEDs in them so they can provide both decoration and functional illumination for my backyard. Read on to find out more about the installation, the lights, controlling them with WLED, and, new to me, controlling them locally with TinyTuya.

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The Ustellar 100 W light set box and one of the lights.

In my my last post, I looked at four different sets of inexpensive LED flood lights to see which could be controlled using WLED. While they all could be controlled with WLED to some extent, only some could take advantage of WLED’s extensive library of built-in effects. In this post, I’m going to take a detailed look at the 100W version of Ustellar’s GemBand set of six RGBW smart flood lights. It’s a little different than the previous sets but can still be controlled with WLED with one pretty big caveat.

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