Quite appropriately, the first board that I exposed with my UV exposure box was a timer to control the exposure. The heart of the timer is a Picaxe 08M2 microcontroller. The timer has also an inexpensive 16×2 characters LCD display (based on a HD44780 controller protocol) and a rotary encoder to set the time. The rotary includes a push button that starts and stops the timer and the exposure. An I2C I/O expander chip PCF8574 interfaces the PICAXE to the display module to save i/o pins on the microcontroller. This way even a small 8-pin microcontroller can be used. Continue reading PCB exposure timer with Picaxe microcontroller and LCD display
Tag Archives: picaxe
Sound triggered glowing led eyes for Halloween
As we are getting close to Halloween, I’ll present this project I did last year. It is about a pair of leds that will light up when there is a loud sound, such as a person raising her voice. The intensity of the leds will depend on the loudness. I used yellow leds as the eyes for a moose/elk antler trophy at my cottage. For this project, as for many others, I used a Picaxe 08M2 microcontroller. Picaxes are inexpensive, very simple to use, BASIC language programmable and Microchip Pic based, see picaxe.com. You can do surprisingly much with them.
The project has two parts, a small board for the Picaxe and another for a sound sensor with condenser microphone, amplifier and peak detector. Continue reading Sound triggered glowing led eyes for Halloween