Add a Multi-Colour Backlight to Your 6-digit Nixie Clock

The Six Digit Nixie Clock we published in Mai 2016 was greeted with a lot of enthusiasm. One of its users, F1Andy, posted a design for an upgrade to add WS2812-based multi-colour backlighting to the clock. He reworked the software too. Now it has alarm functions and it can display the date. To extend the life of the Nixie tubes dimming and anti-cathode poisoning was added as well. Note that some of these new functions require minor hardware modifications of the clock. An official Elektor PCB for the multi-colour backlight will be available soon.

Conceded: twilight switches with lots of bells and whistles are available for next to nothing. But isn't it nevertheless much nicer to build something like that yourself – with literally 10 components?

There are many temperature-related effects that can be used to measure temperature. The chirping sound produced by a cricket is one of them. Here is a simple Arduino-based circuit that let's you emulate a thermometer cricket.

The colours are mostly okay but we want lamps to be s-m-a-r-t-e-r. Like use the processing power of a smartphone to light in rhythm with music, simulate sunset when you go to sleep or turn on automatically when you walk into the room. Lumina does all that — on BLE and from your Android smartphone or tablet.

Recent studies suggest that exposing living creatures of all sorts, animal or vegetal, to music has positive effects on their development and well-being. Inspired by this idea, the author developed a system to stimulate the growth of tomatoes inside a small greenhouse.

As most clocks do, this clock too displays time and date, and it does so on a small TFT screen. However, this clock also announces the time & date at predefined moments or at the press of a pushbutton. Because the user must record his/her own time messages, the clock is truly multilingual (and, in fact, can say anything you like).

This article describes the electronics, the BL600 program and the Android program; the last being an Android smartphone application with which your mains switch circuit may be controlled wirelessly. You may notice an unusual detail for these pages — the transformerless power supply.

Playing with the mains voltage can be deadly, so proper isolation techniques and safe working practices are very important. Besides emphasizing these lifesaving things, this article also explains in detail how to apply them when building an AC load controller or light dimmer with a well-designed PCB. The device itself can be connected to a microcontroller, but also to an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi board.

Wireless doorbells have been around for many years, but they have limited range. Besides more pleasing sounds than a loud DRRRING from a wired bell they do not really offer much more. Connecting a doorbell to your Wi-Fi network makes things way more interesting. Now suddenly the old button can send email when someone is at the door and you can “hear” it almost anywhere on the globe.

This is one of those projects that many people dream of building, but few actually do all the way. Admit it, you too have thought at least once about automated curtain openers in your bedroom, yet I have only once met a guy who had really done it. This system spouts water at cats to chase them away. I’m gonna build me one of these too, but against pigeons.