The guard at our building is the friendliest ex-state-patrol guy you’ll ever meet and we’ll definitely miss him when he retires here in a little over a month. We’ve been joking around about how many days he has left — over 5 million seconds when we first started counting. He’s such a great guy that I wanted to do something special for him and, being the geek I am I thought I’d give him him something useful, yet Rube Goldberg-esque at the same time: a “how many seconds left” count down timer.
I used an Arduino Uno board and a 16×2 LCD display (both from the excellent SparkFun online store) and a couple hours of scrounging around the workbench until, ta-da, a count down timer:
The Sparkfun shipping box even provides a nice enclosure for the whole geeky project. I’m sure this will be the best retirement gift he gets!