Sunrise lamp add-on for nixie alarm clock.

IMG_0848Finnish winter days are dark and cold. The sun rises only for short moment, and even then it is often cloudy, or the sun is so low that it can rarely be seen. A circadian clock is synchronized with daylight changes, and so without external stimulus from sunlight, my daily rhythm started to lag and spin around. Waking at morning was difficult task.

There is a ready-made solution for this, e.g. Philips does sell alarm clocks with build in wake-up lamps, that turn on at morning to artificially sync humans internal clock. Me being hacker, I had to make my own solution, as usual. Read More …

How to fix moody Arduino nano

IMG_8331Apparently I’m not the only one that have had problems with a Arduino (clone) nano’s USB connection. Usually it works ok but sometimes, particularly when an external power input is used, a FTDI chip inside the Arduino does not want to be detected by computer. This is bug made by the original Arduino developers to their schematics, and can be easily fixed afterwards if there is odd troubles with it. Read More …

I feel so stupid ಠ_ಠ

Now I know why I2C was not working in my nixie clock. Today I got an arduino nano from helsinki hacklab, and started to troubleshoot my circuit. Oddly RTC worked when I tried it in breadboard, and also in clock’s motherboard, when nothing else were connected. Also noticed that when nixie driverboard was connected, both of the i2c lines had weird resistance to 5v and ground. I once again removed driver board from case and measured. It was ok, of course. I didn’t even tough about cabling <.< Read More …