Projects In The Pipeline

The projects mentioned here may never happen. This page is just a place where I jot down ideas as they occur to me.

Theremin

The first project that I'm considering is a version of the Theremin musical instrument.

My blog post “A Sort-Of-Theremin - Another Project?” explains the rationale.

This is a long term aspiration - whether it goes ahead depends on how well the Electro Tongue Drum project comes along.

Portable temperature, pressure & humidity gauge

We don't have a household thermometer, but could do with one. Other than on our dehumidifier, we don't have a humidity gauge. But due to our high humidity, we need one. We don't have a baramoter but it would be interesting to have one.

I'm thinking it would be interesting to kill three birds with one stone and build my own portable, combined device.

I've got some components in stock to build this thing: a temperature / humidity sensor, a pressure sensor, an OLED display and a Raspberry Pi Pico. I just need to find a case.

Fancy clock

There's a really nice neopixel based clock on Instructables.com named “LEDura - Analog LED Clock”. It uses two neopixel rings: a large one that displays minutes and a smaller one for the hours.

I would like to build something similar but with some additional features, for example:

• A better way to update / correct the time.
• Possible infra red control of the clock's features.
• Use motion detection to switch on the clock display.
• Use an internet connection to set the clock using a time server.
• Display the times of the next local low and high tides on request. Pretty specific I know, but useful for me! This will need an internet connection too.
• Display temperature (and maybe humidity) on request. Yeah, I know I seem obsessed with this!

Dunno how many of those ideas will make it into the final build.

A WiFi enabled ESP32 is the microcontroller of choice for this project.

Washing line rain sensor

As I mentioned already, we get quite a lot of rain. We regularly fail to notice the start of yet another shower and have dart out into the back garden to grab washing from the line.

So, how about a rain sensor that we can switch on whenever we put washing out? It should sound an alarm and/or send us texts when rain is detected.

Of course there's a risk that we'll either forget to turn it on when we put washing out or forget to turn it off afterwards. Is there a way, I wonder, of detecting washing being hung on the line and removed later?

Touch screen DAW controller

I've often fancied buying a touch screen controller for my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), like the Elgato Stream Deck, but have never got round to it. I'm not sure I can justify the cost.

The idea behind these things is that icons are displayed on a touch screen that control commonly used actions in the DAW. The shortcuts are customisable to suit your own workflow.

Having recently purchased a TFT touchscreen from AliExpress, it struck me that I could probably make one myself based around the touch screen, driven by a suitable microcontroller. The microcontroller would act as a HID Keyboard over USB or bluetooth. It would just be a matter of getting the MCU to emit the appropriate keyboard shortcuts when certain icons were pressed. Did I just say "just"‽

Digital pocket watch

A like pocket watches. My antique silver watch broke quite some time ago and I miss it.

I was looking at a circular TFT screen I'd just been playing around with when an idea struck me. People use these displays to make clocks, so why not build one into a pocket watch case? The idea of having an old case containing a high tech display appealed to me. I then considered using a full hunter watch case that would switch the display off and on when the lid was closed and opened respectively.

Now, I'm not going to gut my antique watch to do this. But old watch cases can be bought relatively inexpensively on eBay, so I could use one of those. I'm not sure whether I can find a display and microcontroller that fits in such a case though, so another option would be to 3D print a suitable watch case. But for that I'll need a 3D printer! Could be cheaper to buy another silver watch!