What is it? #

My dashboard is a small tactile device that gives me access to the data I need to start the morning without checking my phone.

Why did I make it? #

As has everyone I become evermore reliant on digital devices, my phone, my laptop (fortunatley not yet my fridge). I have been trying to regain more of my free time to spend enjoying my productive hobbies, this was a first foray into dedigitizing my free time, starting with the morning only made sense.

How does it work? #

A Potentiometer and several buttons are connected up to an arduino which in turn is hooked up to an lcd screen.

The Arduino is loaded up with a C++ Program that takes in the physical input, and in turn performs tasks based on the input many of which reach out to another device called a raspberry pi. My pi has another program running on it, this program reaches out to a number of data sources I have set up, api’s, preloaded data, etc.

When the desired info is retrieved it is passed back to the arduino.

The arduino interprets the binary data and then displays it in an elegant manner on the display

Ingredients #

• several buttons
• an equal number of resistors for pull down
• heaps of wires
• a wiring breadboard
• a lcd display
• a arduino
• a raspberry pi (3 i think).

What I learned #

Creating physical computing devices has long been something on my radar, but due to the investment required to get started(about €250 for the ‘ingredients’), it’s been a joy to get a bit closer to the silicon and electronics around me and gain an understanding of the engineering challanges it poses. I really enjoyed getting back into cicuitry and gaining an understanding of issues like debouncing and binary parsing.

Repo #

Private : https://github.com/jackvnm/arduino-project-api-display.git