External notification light for your phone

Among other interesting things, Android 4.3 introduced a proper way of accessing notifications from an app. I used this API to make an external notification light for my phone:



It uses Adafruit's Trinket, a Bluetooth serial board from dx.com to talk to the phone and it's powered via USB. Here's a diagram of the connections:



The Arduino sketch that's running on the Trinket is very simple, it listens on the serial line that's connected to the Bluetooth board and turns the LED on and off depending on what character is received. You can see the sketch here. On Android side, the code is also pretty simple, there's an intent filter in the manifest to register a listener that gets called whenever a notification is posted or dismissed. In the listener we check what notifications are active and if they requested the notification light to be turned on (your phone might not even have a notification light, but the information is still there). Then we connect to the Trinket via Bluetooth and tell it to turn the LED on or off. You can see the code here. There is no UI and the Bluetooth address is hardwired.

There is no special permission in the manifest to let the app access notifications, instead you grant access via a checkbox in the security section of your phone's settings:



As usual, there's room for improvement. For example if the phone fails to connect to the device via Bluetooth (because it's out of range or powered off), it should probably try again in some time. Also, we could have an RGB LED and send color and timing information, instead of just on/off state, to better replicate the behavior of the notification light.

Morse code Bluetooth keyboard

My previous attempt at a Morse code keyboard worked over USB and used a copper coin as a capacitive sensor. Since then I've acquired a real telegraph key and Adafruit's Bluefruit EZ-Key board. With that and a Trinket I made a Morse code Bluetooth keyboard. It works with any computer that has Bluetooth (also phones and tablets).



Here's what it looks like in action (as usual please excuse my lack of Morse code skills):



Here's the Arduino sketch that's running on the Trinket. As before there's a buzzer for feedback and the transmission speed is fixed.

If you're into Morse code, I continue to recommend my Android application that listens to Morse code using your smartphone's microphone and translates it to text.

Here's a diagram of the connections:

Bluetooth mouse from a Wii nunchuck

I never had a Nintendo Wii, but I got a nunchuck controller to play with. It has a joystick, two buttons, an accelerometer for orientation sensing and the third-party ones are dirt cheap. It turns out that it's really easy to talk to them from an Arduino too, because they speak I2C and as you would expect the protocol is well documented on the Internet. I used Adafruit's Trinket, Bluefruit EZ-Key and a 100 mAh lipo battery to turn the nunchuck into a Bluetooth mouse:



Here's a diagram of the connections, pin 1 on the Trinket goes to the RX pin on the Bluefruit and pins 0 and 2 are used for the I2C communication with the nunchuck:



On the software side, I used the WiiChuck class I found here, but I modified it to use the TinyWireM library for I2C. It is equivalent to the standard Arduino Wire library, but it runs on ATtiny chips like the one used by the Trinket. I also used this SendOnlySoftwareSerial library. Here's my sketch and the modified WiiChuck library.

I haven't found any clever use for the accelerometer inside the nunchuck yet, perhaps it could somehow be used for scrolling.

Bluetooth emergency mute button

Some time ago I made an emergency mute button that connected over USB. Now with Adafruit's Bluefruit EZ-Key I made a wireless version that works over Bluetooth. Look, no wires:



In addition to the Bluefruit board, I used a Trinket and a 100 mAh lipo battery. It all fit nicely inside the button:



Here's a diagram of the connections:



There's no on/off switch and to charge the battery I have to disassemble the whole thing, but hey, nobody's perfect. Here's the Arduino sketch that's running on the Trinket, it simply sends the "mute" key code when it detects a change in the state of the button. I'm using this SendOnlySoftwareSerial library, because I'm only sending data to the Bluefruit board.

(You will notice that it still suffers from the synchronization problem that the USB version had - if you mute audio on your computer some other way than using the button, then pressing the button will actually unmute audio. It's because the button is stateful, but has no way of finding out what the actual state of audio on the computer is and there are no separate key codes for muting and unmuting.)