A while ago I made some videos of writing a Raspbian to a SD card for use with a Raspberry Pi, I am on a mac, which makes my life much easer as there is now an awesome tool called ApplePi-Baker that makes making SD cards much easer than DD […]
Maker
86 posts
Bob found these ESP8266 based Wi-Fi Relays from china, the “Sonoff – WiFi Wireless Smart Switch For MQTT COAP Smart Home” and being that he is is kind of a geek he bought some, now in typical China fashion the difference between 3 and 5 was not all that much, so […]
Tas, MiniBoyGeek and I had a quick walk round the Steam Punk Spectacular at the Swindon Steam Museum (will have to do Photos of that some other time). Podpad Studios were there with some of their cool steampunk stuff, and some one (not sure who) brought a Caravan. The rest […]
I have been playing about with Fusion 360, one of thrings you will need to include before very long is a fixing, even if you can 3D print everything in your design at some point you will want to stick two parts together at which point you will need a […]
Well that is MiniBoyGeek up to three working electric Lego Duplo locomotives, only the Chinese one to go… I spoke to the seller: > Item died within 10 minutes of putting batteries into it. refund required. > I am still awaiting a response to my question re refund or replacement […]
Recently there have been people claiming that they can steal money from your pocket (up to £30) by skimming your credit or debit card info using a EPOS (Electronic Point of Sale) or PED (Pin Entry Device). It said thieves could exploit a security flaw to steal key data from […]
The soldering of SMD devices is something that no normal person would want to do by hand for fun, I can’t even believe that normal people would do it anyway (it is a cruel and unusual punishment). Hackspace Manchester has recently thanks to Matt bought an Infer Red IC Oven […]
Sometimes I feel that my geek credentials are lacking given the lack of code I write, yes I make cool things occasionally, I work as an EMC Engineer for a small Stockport Company, I am a Director of Squashed Fly a small independent Hosting and General Geeky company with Tas, […]
A lot of Chinese Arduinos come with the ch340 as the replacement for the FTDI or other serial bridge. I have nothing against the CH340 / CH340G however it is a PITA (BREAD – Pain In The Arse) to use under OS X as well there is a fuck ton […]
I found MCN Gerber Viewer, at this site, it is an OS X application for viewing and printing Gerber files, the zip of the app is Mirrored here. I have been working on PCBs more frequently, and along with Eagle this is a useful tool.
Normaly I would use a cheap chineese clone, but I had an official Arduino Uno available, The process should be the same no matter which you use. Now given that an Chineese clone of the Uno is about £3 you may wonder why you would want to use a £1.20 […]
Today like last year I went to Bristol for the mini maker Faire (unlike Manchester and Liverpool Makefest this one still pays the silly amount of money to use the make branding). Unlike last year @Bristol charged at the door (£3 pp which may not sound like a lot, but […]
I downloaded Random Nerd’s Build a Home Automation System for $100 and started testing it out, A while ago I aquired a Fish Dish (not sure where from), It’s a small PCB that fits on the GPIO header of the Raspberry Pi. I set up NodeRed and MQTT on the […]
A while ago I backed the kickstarter campaign for Particle (formerly Spark)’s Electron board, a IOT (internet of things) with a built in 3G modem (2G are available) with global data coverage, recently they shipped, Setup was as easy as getting it out the box, wiring it up and following […]
This is an update from a previous post, since there have been some changes to getting them to work under OSX. I found these Arduino Uno clones (link) on Ali Express for £2.16 each with free shipping from china, I can’t even get Diavolino for that little (Also a Diavolino […]
Following on from playing with the Hi-link HLK-PM01 I got this generic even cheaper board from Ben Dooks, after carefully wiring it up, I shoved it on the Kikusui TOS 8650 Withstand Voltage Tester: This shows the cheap chinese powersupply breaking just below 2 kVac. The following photos are from a Chinese seller […]
More than a few years ago, I bought myself a Remote Control boat, a Kyosho Wave Master: The WaveMaster is a semi scale model of an F-1 tunnel hull racing boat. Tunnel hulls work by trapping a cushion of air between the hull and water to reduce friction which allows […]
Following on from trying to program the LinkIt ONE on Mac, and Windows, I went looking for further information, I managed to find some information on the IDE GitHub page, I will compare how easy it is to program each of them with Blink.ino. My mac is set up as […]
Tas, Bob and I headed over to the National Model Engineering and Modelling Exhibition 2015 in Harrogate.
Following on from the Mac instructions, I have also set up MediaTek’s LinkIt™ ONE on a Window Machine, Setup Download the MediaTek LinkIt SDK for Arduino Windows. Unzip the downloaded zip, right click on the installer “mediatek_linkit_sdk_(for_arduino)-1.1.05.exe” and “Run as administrator” Change the location on Screen two to the location […]
A few weekends ago, HACMan, Tas and I were at MakerFaire New Castle. One of the exhibitors there was MediaTek, showing off their range of LinkIt Wearables / IoT (Tnternet of Things) development boards. I have managed to snag myself a LinkIt One development board kit: Optimized performance and power […]
I have finally got round to trying to Automate the hot water pump on the boat, using what I found out about the DS18B20 one wire Waterproof Temperature sensors from the Arduino Data logger I wanted to try out controlling the pump, (the same PCB will be used for other automation […]
The Arduino IDE serial console sucks! (the entire Arduino IDE kind of sucks, but one fix at a time). I first tried to use the native Minicom package, the most up to date one I found was version 2.2 (compiled Mar 16 2007), it can be installed and set up […]
At work we had need for a multiple temperature logging device. Using one of my cheap Chinese Arduino Uno clones, some DS18B20 one wire Waterproof Temperature Transducers (like these ones), a cheap Ethernet / SD card shield (like this), and a DS1307 RTC (Real Time clock) (link). The DS1307 RTC […]
I found these Arduino Uno clones (link) on Ali Express for £2.16 each with free shipping from china, I can’t even get Diavolino for that little (Also a Diavolino needs a RS232 / FTDI or something as well). These clones come with something different, rather than the usual FTDI they […]
A Stevenson screen is an outdoor enclosure to shield meteorological instruments against precipitation and direct heat radiation (sometimes called a radiation screen) from outside sources, while still allowing air to circulate freely around them. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) agreed standard for the height of the screen is between 1.25 […]
Similer to how I deal with keeping Eagle in sync between multiple machines, I try to do the same with the Arduino IDE and Processing. In my dropbox folder I store my projects in a sub folder called Projects, and in there I have a folder called “_Vitamins” (the _ […]