Thursday March 28th, 2024
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Video: Watch How Egyptian Engineers Make An IKEA Clock Changes Colours According To Cairo Traffic

What happens when an ordinary IKEA clock falls into the hands of Egyptian engineers at Integreight? They turn the clock forward...with colours!

Staff Writer

So, is it possible for technology to stop luring us in by making our lives significantly easier? Apparently not, because now, Egyptian engineers from Intergreight, Amr Saleh and Eslam Ali, with the help of their product, 1Sheeld, which they have managed to integrate with Arduino – a cheap and easily programmable minicomputer – along with an IKEA clock, and some hacks using Google Maps, some LED lights, cables, batteries, all to change colours based on how much traffic awaits you before you leave the house.

The product, 1Sheeld, created by Ali and Saleh, is a shield for the Arduino system, and that's as far as we got before the technobabble melts our brains. So, according to the engineers themselves, "To make a project with Arduino you need to buy some accessories to hook it to the internet or connect it to a touchscreen, these accessories are called shields. So, 1Sheeld is basically a shield that allows you to use your smart phones as input or output for Arduino," as per the product's description. Got that? We totally got that.

The colours are red and green; obviously red is for 'unless you want to get stuck in your car for hours, just sit down', and green is for 'get the hell out of your office and run home while you can!'

The video below explains how you can get your supernerd card by building one of these 'SmartClocks' yourself: