Busy hands | Disquiet mind

I made a watch. Because of course I did. Same wrist-strap and general idea as the LilyPad and Protoboard Wrist Controller. But the protoboard is populated with a Real Time Clock (RTC) module, and four-digit seven-segment display.

I'm using the SparkFun DeadOn RTC module. I got it for another project and just happened to have it laying around. You can get others that use fewer pins though, like I used in the clock. (DeadOn RTC setup guide). Downsides include not being able to find the right sized battery. (I had to go to Belgium for it, and it still hasn't arrived.) Upsides include the module having two alarms. One to the second, the other to the minute.

If I have alarms I'm going to need an alert, so throw in a LilyPad Buzzer (as in speaker) (Buzzer setup guide), and a SPDT slide switch to put it into silent mode. And if it's on silent I'm going to want a vibrate option, so add a LilyPad Vibe Board. This is the Vibe Board setup guide, but I'm doing things a bit differently. I'm not using a MOSFET, and I connected - to GND, and + to PWM pin 6. It works just fine.

To see the time I'll need a nice display like Adafruit 4-Digit 7-Segment Display with I2C Backpack (Display Backpack library setup), and a nice Metal Ball Tactile Button to turn it on and off.

Then I just have to figure out how to connect everything together, and program it.

( Details )

Then just turn everything on! There is quite a lot you can do with this kind of completely hackable setup. As it is you can use the alerts to train yourself to have a better understanding of time. Just by having it vibrate on the hour every hour. You could make it a countdown timer so you can remind yourself to stop talking. Or any arbitrary period to remind yourself to take breaks. You could use some of the empty pins and add a motion sensor. Then you can keep track of your activity and if you don't move around enough each hour you can alert yourself. You can tailor everything to yourself exactly. But, as a reminder, do not get this wet. If you really want to use this as an activity tracker you'd be better off minimising it and adding a skin-safe water/sweat-proof enclosure. But for general time related body hacking this is a decent start.

LilyPad watch assembled and operational
Photo by chebe

Time to play with some super bright LEDs! (Just remember; do not look directly at them while powered.)

Kitronik have some lovely 3W LEDs (with unfortunate name) in a star shape for heat dissipation. They provide a datasheet with example circuit for 5V power source. It requires 2.2 ohm power resistors, which are new to me. But when I tried regular resistors there was a lot of smoke, so they are definitely required.

I want to control the lights from a lower voltage micro-controller, so I'm going to need some N-channel MOSFETs. This is my first time using these. The Data pin (from the Arduino) acts a switch to complete the higher power circuit that lights up the LED.

All together the circuit looks a bit like this.

( Images )

I find myself, like many of us, sitting at my desk a lot. I sit there for work. I sit there again for the many video and/or voice socials that have been set up. I sit there to play games or watch films. I even clear off the computer stuff and sit there to solder and work on projects. I am, in fact, sitting there now as I write this. So basically, I sit there a lot. And it got so that I found it difficult to know what time it was, whether early or late, start of the day, or end. I know, I thought, possibly aloud, no-one will ever know, I need a clock.

But I didn't want to go buying lots of unnecessary things, or wait until my usual suppliers were back in full swing. So I dug around in the piles of boxes that comprise my electronics stash. Back at GaelHack (seven years ago) I started on a clock, but it never left the breadboard. I dusted that off, and found most of what else I needed.

( Making it all fit together )

Given the purpose of the device, and age of most of the components, I had half a mind to refer to this as a Time Capsule, but Time Cuboid seems more self-explanatory.
Overall it looks something like this;

Time Cuboid, on
Photo by chebe