Seeed Studio is running a toy hacking contest, they’re looking for step-by-step instructions for projects using their GROVE Toy kit. The GROVE wiki page says it all. I submitted an entry, and was accepted as a contestant. Here’s some more info about my entry, and the progress I’ve made so far.
We refinished an old wooden play kitchen set for our two-year-old daughter last Christmas. She love playing with it, and, mimicking the way her folks use their own kitchen, she’ll say “beep beep beep”, and go over and look in, and say, “Is it done?”. Too adorable. Here’s the kitchen:
I thought a good project would be to retrofit it with some electronics. I’d like to add a timer (and possibly temperature) control panel for the oven, with buttons to set the timer and the oven, and a display showing the time left (not with numbers, but just a progress-bar-esque thing trickling down). There will be a buzzer or beeper for when the timer goes off. I’d also like to include a light inside the oven that is turned on when the door is opened. Maybe the color of the light would respond to the temperature set on the oven.
Here’s a closeup of the stove. I’m planning to attach the panel to the back, somehow, just like our non-play oven.
With the things available in the contest pack, I thought I could use the PIR motion sensor to determine when the oven door was opened, the RGB LED for the light, and the touch sensor, OLED display, and buzzer (or possibly, the vibrator) for the control panel. Since I don’t actually have an Arduino form-factor controller board to plug into the Stem shield, I requested one as part of the kit, and Seeed was kind enough to include it for me.
Stay tuned for more details, example programs, and a few Arduino libraries to support these hardware components.
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