What does it take to build a geocaching box that can only be opened at sunset? A box, a button, an electronic lock, an electronic clock, and a controller that ties everything together.
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Anything that has to do with Geocaching
Synchronism
In 2013, we found the Seattle-Köln Exchange Multicache, which requires cooperation between geocachers from Cologne and Seattle. This led to the idea of a geocache where two people at different locations had to press a button at exactly the same time in order to be able to open their respective cache boxes. And now the idea has become a reality!
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Winter is coming …
And now, there is more time to sit at your desk and do “nerdy” things, such as soldering and coding.
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Parasitic Power Supply
In parasitic power supply mode, a device sucks its juice from a data line instead of from the power rail. This can be intended or unintended. In the latter case, all sorts of funny things can happen.
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Fixing Problems … Using Super-Global Variables
Another xkcd comic that hits the spot. Except, with my new hardware debugger, this is the past 😎. Recently, I debugged one of my electronic geocaching gadgets and was positively surprised how easy it was to figure out ones own mistakes and to come up with the right fix.
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Connecting the Dots
If you want to drive a 5×7 dot matrix display directly from your MCU, I have the right Arduino library for you. Flexible, easy to use, supporting low power operation, and a low memory footprint: DotMatrix5x7.
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Another Piece of the Puzzle
For a recent geocache, which is a tribute to the well-known Tetris game, I wanted people to solve a simple physical puzzle (as shown in the image above). As a reward, they get a code that they can use to open a box. So, what do you have to do to make things work? And how do you make sure that you do not have to change batteries for the next 20 years?
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