Raising and breeding birds in some climates can be an issue, due to the lack of natural sunlight or continual overcast weather. Everyone likes a sunny day and birds are no exception. To help a relative who breeds birds in a poor sunlight area, Instructables member pbronneberg has used an Arduino as the base for a daylight simulator.
By using a real-time clock IC, cool-white LED modules and associated circuitry, the system can create the required increasing and decreasing light levels to simulate natural daylight - changing intensity levels when required or also on demand. And the system cost well under the amount asked for retail units.
Another excellent Arduino-based solution to an expensive problem, of which you can read more about in the project page. And for more, we're on facebook, Google+, and twitter - so follow us for news and product updates as well.
To get started with your own timing projects, use our real-time clock module based on the DS3232 - with a temperature-controlled oscillator it is highly accurate, and has an onboard backup battery for when the power dies and 236 bytes of non-volatile memory for user data.