Latest addition ✨ One Hurts! A most annoying clock – How to turn a cheap quartz clock mechanism into perhaps the most annoying cuckoo clock ever: flashing LEDs, nodding snowman, and a tick-tock chime every second. Made for the 2025 Hackaday One Hertz Challenge.

LEAP is just my personal collection of electronics projects – usually involving an Arduino or other microprocessor in one way or another. Some are full-blown projects, while many are trivial breadboard experiments, intended to learn and explore something interesting.

Projects are often inspired by things found wild on the net, or ideas from the many great electronics podcasts and YouTube channels. Feel free to borrow liberally, and if you spot any issues do let me know (or send a PR!). See the individual projects for credits where due.

For a while I have also included various scale modelling projects here too, but I’ve now split those off into a new repository. Check out LittleModelArt if you are looking for the modelling projects!

The best way to browse the projects is to take a look at the LEAP Catalog. It’s actually a static web site generated directly from the repository. Try it out:

Some projects require additional libraries including FastLED, FlexiTimer2, RadioHead. A set of such libraries are included as submodules of this repository, see the libraries/ page for more information on the included libraries and submodule management.

For Arduino projects, I have the Arduino IDE sketchbook location (in preferences) set to the root of this repository. This makes all the projects available to me in the IDE, and automatically includes libraries that are linked as git submodules in the libraries/ folder.

If you don’t have the Arduino IDE setup this way, libraries can be retrieved with git, or you can just install them separately as you would any other library.

If you clone this repo, also update the submodules to have them available for compilation:

git submodule update --init

To pull submodule updates later on:

git submodule foreach git pull

To update a specific library later on, e.g. TextFinder:

git submodule update --remote libraries/TextFinder

I started the LittleArduinoProjects GitHub repository back in 2014. Over the years it accumulated over 2Gb of obsolete commits, and so much git history that it wasn’t even possible to do a git push of the entire repo without resorting to batch tricks.

Entering the 11th year of the repository, I decided to do a one-time squash of the project history and essentially restart the git history from scratch:

• https://github.com/tardate/LittleArduinoProjects remains the primary repo
  • but with the git history squashed
    • retains the original first commit as the base, so any clones and forks will share a common root commit
  • I’ve taken the opportunity to rename the working branch from master to main
• https://github.com/tardate/LittleArduinoProjects-archive-2014-2024 is a snapshot of the repository prior to the squash
  • marked as archived in GitHub, with issues etc disabled
  • retains the full git history in the very unlikely event that anyone needs to refer back to specific change

What this means in practice:

• if you are just viewing LittleArduinoProjects on GitHub or the web, there is no impact
• if you have a clone of the LittleArduinoProjects repository:
  • the simplest is just to throw it away and make a fresh clone of the repo
  • if you have work-in-progress changes on private branches, you will probably want to cherry-pick the changes to a branch based on the new main branch
    • if you need help with that, reach out or post an issue
• old pull requests (PR) will be based on the old history. Reviving any old PRs will require the changes to be rebased on the new history.

Hopefully this will help make the LittleArduinoProjects repository fit for use for another 10 years or more..