#Arduino simple timer code

For example, my previous build would be possible to do without it for sure. In the end, using Arduino could also be cheating. I have fun building stuff, but not when it takes ages, and I need to first learn tons of things before making a small hello world. At least it depends on why you are even playing with Arduino. You just need to use Google.Ī small side note: If you feel this is cheating, well, it’s not. Arduino is quite popular, and almost everything you are trying to build, someone already made before you. The good news is, you don’t have to do everything alone. I wanted something nice, but my musical skill is not good, and I cannot simply play an mp3 file on Arduino. It just needs some time to test a few options, see how it works, and find the best usage. In the end, the setting was easy to tweak. Int value = analogRead ( A0 ) value = map ( value, 0, 980, 1, 20 ) value = min ( value, 10 ) + max ( 0, value - 10 ) * 5 value *= 60 Therefore, I came up with a solution: precision of one minute for the first ten minutes, and anything beyond jumps by five minutes up to one hour-a reasonable compromise of wide range and fine-tuning the short reminders. Do you want your egg to be boiled precisely for eight minutes? Too bad… Mapping twenty steps to sixty minutes mean having a precision of three minutes. Our mechanical kitchen timer could do that. Sometimes, I need a reminder in one hour. Suddenly, I could cover now twenty minutes.īut twenty minutes is not enough sometimes. How often do you need second precision? Never. Now, the task was to find a way to fit a broad range into twenty steps only.

A slight change on the potentiometer can be a pretty massive change of the value.Īfter testing, I found that good behavior is with 20 steps only. To cover every fifth second in ten minutes, I need over 100 steps. The issue was still that my Arduino provides a range of zero to 1023. Ten kilo-ohms were better but still not as good as the final solution with one hundred.Īt least stability was good. The analog value was not so accurate and stable with just 1kΩ. That was too granular resolution range for too clumsy potentiometer range. The range was from zero to ten minutes with a jump of five seconds. My first version used a 1kΩ potentiometer, and the analog value mapped to the time range. The tricky part for me was to come up with an appropriate setting. It perfectly fits the 7-segment 4-digit display and says hello in Czech (and other languages). When the timer is plugged in, the first message is AHOJ. I used a simple matchbox as a case for this project.

This schema can look like this when converted to the physical world. The schema also connects buzzer using transistor for cases when buzzer operates on different voltages than Arduino, something I didn’t have to do. For example, my display is connected over I2C instead of over serial. Note it might be a bit different in your case as it depends on what exactly you have around. You can check out the rough schema in the following picture. 7-segment display to set and show timer.It’s a too fine device for my skills (and tools).īut! No one can stop me from making an even cooler kitchen timer presenting Arduino, right? At least that I can do. You read it well: the result is no build and no kitchen timer anymore. And there is an endless list of videos on the internet! It is a remarkably great device! Learning the process of how all springs are connected was tremendous fun for me. I was curious how much miserably I failed and opened it. Which is fine because we had a mechanical kitchen timer anyway. I found some springs around, so I thought I could build a more simplistic kitchen timer because I was amazed by automatic watches. I had no idea what I could do or even what I could manage to do (I had to use what I had at home because hobby shops were not open during strict lockdown when the course was ongoing). One of the projects as part of the course was precisely that-mechanical build. For sure, it is not as easy as developing (web) applications-UX and technical options are pretty limited-yet still not that challenging as creating a fully mechanical project.

#Arduino simple timer code

It is just about connecting pieces together and writing code for it. Electrical builds, including Arduino or Raspberry, are relatively easy for me. In the previous post about page turner project, I talked about the course, which forced me to allocate my time and really build something.