Making a terrarium with an Arduino-powered artificial sun | Hacker News Reader

Making a terrarium with an Arduino-powered artificial sun

twiddlingbits.net

84 pointstaubek19 comments

A much more accurate artificial sun https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw

I hoped this would be linked here. I have hopes of building something like this one day to function as a "morning alarm" through winter months. Who knows, maybe it would make a difference.

I walk around 5:30am just about every day and it gets to be so grating to wake, walk, and get home – all without seeing the sun rise at all. Part of me hopes that having a super bright sun-like light in my space might help alleviate that.

Otherwise, what an amazing channel! I really like this guy's work.

This is really amazing

Having far more scifi experience than terrariums, I was expecting some kind of tabletop fusion but that will do.

Ya know who needs that project even more though? The other recent front page story, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34802858 , the folks who stay over solar winter at the South Pole.

There's nothing about Arduinos there... the project uses an Adafruit board based on the RP2040 microcontroller (the one of the Raspberry Pi pico). I guess they used "Arduino" to mean "microcontroller board".

I came here just to write this... As the co-founder of Arduino I find this use of Arduino as a generic "microcontroller board" or "not a raspberry pi" a bit shocking.. :)

You're up there with Google, Hoover, Xerox... bask in it :)

Isn’t Arduino both a hardware term and a software term? I’m working with a nRF52840 board, but I’m using the Arduino IDE to author Arduino code to run on it.

Yes it is. The Arduino framework has been ported to many platforms. However, the OP is about CircuitPython, not using any Arduino software.

Be proud. You started an ecosystem that's taking over the Embedded world :-)

If it's any consolation, everyone seems to feel the need to invent a new word for daughterboard for their own flavor of microcontroller / single board computer.

For a second I though that maybe they meant UI, but no, they used circuit python too

More than you might want to know about research-grade solar-simulators:

https://g2voptics.com/solar-simulation/

It looks like the author is changing the light color and intensity throughout the day to approximate the color of sunlight. But he has a bunch of LEDs in different spatial locations…

You could make the LEDs be different colors based on location to model the light coming from that direction, at that time of day. Then you could get your plants to track.

It might take much brighter LEDs, since the relatively few sunward ones would need to really crank out the photons while most of them were more chill and bluer.

If the leds are addressable yeah that would be cool.

You could even consider the weather outside, and when it’s a fine day have the “sky leds” cast blue and bright, and if it’s cloudy have them a more uniform grey.

>If the leds are addressable yeah that would be cool.

http://magicshifter.net/

I'm a bit confused, the link to the Arduino board seems to go to a raspberry pi clone?

https://store.arduino.cc/products/arduino-nano-rp2040-connec...

“The Arduino with a Raspberry Pi® filling.”

That just looks like worse ESP32 to be entirely honest, when you look at price point

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