The Morse Moai statue project

NEWS FLASH – this project is now on Please go see it there and vote for it in the First Time Author contest 🙂

As a kid, I was very interested in Morse code. There were a few reasons for this – my father was in the Signal Corps during WW2 and his stories of how Morse was used in the war wee fascinating. I had a rather good ear for rhythms, so I learned the codes easily. Then there was the legendary Cub Scout Handbook, as used by Huey, Dewey and Louie. The Finnish publisher of Disney books actually produced one, and of course all ten-year-olds in Finland consumed it cover to cover. One feature of it were Morse codes. My best friend was very handy with electronics already at that age, so we set up a wire between our homes and Morsed our messages to each other.

Until the trash collector truck once ripped the wire.

But anyway – it occurred to me the other day that it’d be a nice feature to have something that would be able to take in text and turn it into Morse code, both audible and LED. (more…)

Finding rotation speed using Arduino

Ooops, it’s been a while since I was last active here, sorry about that.

But to offer someting in retribution, here’s a device that can count revolutions or any other event that closes a switch, and tell you how many times that happens in a minute.

I have a need for this device, because I am building a dolly for timelapse images. The dolly has a 2m long worm screw that makes the dolly travel along an axis. If the trip takes, say, 3 hours, and the dolly carries a camera that is set to take an image every 5 seconds, we get a 3 x 60 x 20 image timelapse, ie. 4,800 images. With 25 images per second in a video, that gives you a 192 seconds, or, a little over 3 minute time lapse. During which the camera moves, you see, it’s not just a timelapse.