DALI: industry's best kept secret

Many microcontrollers have application examples for the Digital Addressable Lighting Interface or DALI standard intended to make equipment from different manufacturers interoperate smoothly. However, DIY projects exploiting this lighting control protocol seem inexistent. The project highlighted this week is about DALI, but it is not complete, and maybe even abandoned. Can you help out?

If it happens to me, it probably happens to other people as well: once you think about it, it is too late. Xmas decoration is such a thing; you just can't start early enough with planning your Xmas decoration, especially when it involves complex lighting schemes requiring hours of programming time. Not this year however with a project that's sure to give you a head start.

Many people snore and many don't mind or seem to notice the noise. Sadly, another good part of humanity looses sleep as a result of snoring bed partners and/or roommates. Does your snoring roommate keep you awake at night? Then the Elektor Snore Shield might be what you need.

The latest AVR microcontrollers from Microchip like the ATmega4809, ATmega3209, ATtiny816, and ATtiny1616 are programmed through a Unified Program and Debug Interface (UPDI). The MKII programmers that many of us have for AVR programming do not support this interface. Luckily, it is possible to build your own from an Arduino and an open-source library. Here is how.

The barrier resistor, or Baristor as the authors call it, is a “resistor” built out of discrete components that abruptly changes its resistance from conducting to non-conducting and back when the voltage over it passes a certain threshold value. Its intended use is in power electronics. To understand the principle we have built three types of Baristors. Now you can have a play too.

Basically a stompbox is nothing more than a wooden box with a microphone in it on which the musical performer stamps the rhythm with her or his foot to produce a sound similar to a bass drum. But today, in the connected-objects world, it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing without an ESP32 or I2C-OLED display. Electronics engineers make musicians happy, 'cause they make them toys. You too can make a musician happy by building this toy.

Olivier Croiset's idea for an alarm clock with its 2.2" TFT display and available as a kit from Elektor, was designed to be simple to use – a modern design which is also ideal for folks of my mother's generation who get frustrated at times by some of these new-fangled gadgets...

Did you ever wonder how fast your hamster can run? Or for how long? The distance it travels? With this project you can finally find out all the details about the furry critter's daily workouts. Keep statistics and graphs in a spreadsheet and see if it stays in shape or if it is getting old. Hamster races would be another application for this brilliant project.

If you ever need a large display to keep the score for games, or a counter for sports events, this is the thing to build. With its four tall (10-cm / 4 inch) 7-segment digits it can be read easily from afar. The project is based on LEDitron modules, i.e. 7-segment displays built from LED filaments as found in modern lamps. And sure, it doubles as a clock!

Feature creep is the phenomenon of adding features to a product or a program that are not necessary for operating the product or program. Examples are colour pickers and font selection options in smartphone apps, and all sorts of other obscure configurable parameters. This little timer does not suffer from feature creep… or does it?