You're waiting for a train. ...
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That heading either means something to you or it doesn't.
Inception. Nothing short of a brilliant film. Well yes, it that time again. Seeing as I only have about 46 alarm clocks, lets make another one. While digging around the workshop, I found a small (and I mean small) aluminium case. Options available here are: 1: Put it back and walk away 2: Put something useful inside it 3: Bin it 4: Spend literally hours 3d designing a clock to fit inside a case 260mm x 170mm. Yea, lets go with option 4. So, a few hours in Tinkercad (it's just so much easier to use Tinkercad for these basic projects), and off to the temperamental filament spurting machine we go. The parts are so small, it didn't actually take that long to print them. Just used end rolls of PLA and some sample filament I had lying around. A bit of a dig around the stores resulted in eight 128x32 OLED screens. Annoyingly they are I2C with the same address on every one, but we can overcome that. |
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Not film accurate. But it was never meant to be so in a box this small.
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The screens fit into small little housings that also take a couple of PCB push buttons.
This project is so tight in the box, that I still had to cut down the PCB's on the screens to get them into the box. Some old aluminium made up the basic plates, and then it was time to start mocking up the layout. This was always going to be a tight fit in this box. The electronics are as follows: 1x Arduino Pro Mini 2x JQ8400 MP3 module (Serial control) + a mini USB to SD card adapter that I butchered. 2x LM386 Amplifier modules 2x Speakers (oh my God, finding small, shallowspeakers was a nightmare) 1x CD4051 Multiplexer IC on it's own small PCB 1x DS1307 RTC (Real time clock) module 1x 7805 5v regulator for external power control 2x Dual AA battery holders The CD4051 is used with 3 address lines to the Pro Mini. This switches the SDA lines the the individual screens when you want to talk to them (as they all have the same I2C address). I found some small glass bottles, 28mm x 14mm on Ebay. The lids needed filing down in size, but otherwise perfect. I filled them with orange shower gel. The RTC will run on it's backup battery when the lid is shut. Upon opening, you get the Inception Horn SFX and the screens fire up. The screens are Time, Alarm time, date, volume, armed, play/stop, track, and equaliser. The equaliser is a simple bar graph triggered off of an analogue input. This is simply lifted off the output of the MP3 module and seems to work well. As usual, there are lots of sound effects. The full Inception soundtrack, along with several remixes of Inception tracks, ten movies quotes and the film trailer. It's for my personal use, so all should be fine there. |
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When you arm and disarm the alarm, you get a blast of the Inception horn, and you can set any track to be the alarm sound.
When making a project this small, on a limited budget, using stuff lying around, it is never going to be a screen accurate copy.
But, this came out pretty good considering the case wasn't correct to start with.
Not going to lie. Getting all this stuff in such a stupidly small case was a challenge. Hardest of all was finding sound decent quality speakers that would fit in the case at all.
I ended up binning internal case accuracy for larger speakers (hence the round grilles). Laptop and small depth speakers were just not cutting it.
Maybe a full screen copy is a future project!
Good old Youtube INSTANTLY flagged up my 3 second usage of the Inception music, so the Youtube link here doesn't have much of the original soundtrack left. Well, it's actually the Music company who flagged it I expect, but hey ho.
Stomp on that creativity.
When making a project this small, on a limited budget, using stuff lying around, it is never going to be a screen accurate copy.
But, this came out pretty good considering the case wasn't correct to start with.
Not going to lie. Getting all this stuff in such a stupidly small case was a challenge. Hardest of all was finding sound decent quality speakers that would fit in the case at all.
I ended up binning internal case accuracy for larger speakers (hence the round grilles). Laptop and small depth speakers were just not cutting it.
Maybe a full screen copy is a future project!
Good old Youtube INSTANTLY flagged up my 3 second usage of the Inception music, so the Youtube link here doesn't have much of the original soundtrack left. Well, it's actually the Music company who flagged it I expect, but hey ho.
Stomp on that creativity.
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