Re-purposing Things

Just over three years ago I wrote about a 3.5in TFT colour screen I had bought for use with the Arduino Mega. You can read about it HERE. The last thing I used it for was to try to show the minute changes in the Earth's magnetic field. That worked but the magnetometer (the bit of hardware which detects the changes) needed to be buried at least 3ft deep away from any other influences, like passing traffic as the metal vehicle body is enough to change the magnetic field.



I gave up on that idea for now but when I bought the Airfryer I found myself forever looking up recipes, especially temperatures and cooking times, for various foods. I started to write them down and then a flash of inspiration! Re-purpose the display to show a list of the items of food I will be airfryijng. Well it rook a lot longer than I thought to get an Arduino sketch (program) to work as it was the first time I had worked with arrays which contained more than one character in each entry. As always it was my lack of understanding when and where to define static, unchanging, and changeable integers, arrays and character strings. After the best part of three days reading and testing I finally made it work as I wanted.



Powered by two lithium rechargeable cells. The green and blue buttons on top allow me to scroll up and down through the list.



Three days of muttering, reading, rewriting code seems a lot for what ended up as less that 100 lines of code but I learned quite a lot and am finding it a useful addition to the kitchen clutter.