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 […]
Arduino
43 posts
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 _ […]
As part of my R-Pi K-9 I want to have a web browser interface, (also because I want to build an ROV) I don’t have a beaglebone black. Using a web browser as my interface will allow me to use my recently acquired iPad to control it, I want to […]
Following on from How electrically noisy are Servo motors – Pt1 where I subjected a Tower Pro MG996R and a Tower Pro Microserver 9g to the ERAD (Emissions Radiated) test. I am now going to do the ECON (Emissions Conducted) test. The ECON test is a scan between 150 kHz […]
At work my day job is as an EMC test Engineer, on of the Tests we do as part of EMC compliance testing is a Radiated Emissions scan between 30 MHz and 1 GHz. There are two sets of emissions limits that are most commonly tested for (others are more […]
As some of you know I may be a bit of a geek, one of the tools I use is the Teensy, it is very smiler in use and specification to an Arduino while not being a pure clone unlike the Diavolino. My preferred member of the family is the […]
For my boat automation system I plan to use RJ45 sockets and cat 5 cable for interconnecting the master and the nodes. Some nodes will have their own 12 V supply for larger loads, but ones that are just for switches and other transducers (sensors) will need to have 12 […]
At Wuthering Bytes in Hebden Bridge, in the afternoon Tas and I attended Matt Venn‘s Eagle cad workshop, if we had been there all day we would have made a Shrimp board. But since I have been using eagle a littlebit, and am far from any good with it, we […]
I found the following code extracts for the Arduino (I have a Diavolino) to work with the RS485 shield from here: Code for the transmitter: Code for the receiver: And a guide for the R-Pi shield (from here). Putting the two together (I don’t have two Arduinos and shields) so […]
On Saturday I picked up an Evil Mad Scientists Arduino clone, The Diavolino, from MadLab‘s little shop “Invent-ory” to use with my RS485 stuff. the Diavolino requires assembly yourself (official instructions). The FTDI I bought was this one: RHX PL2303 USB To RS232 They are about £2.29 per. however where Windows […]
Following on from the RS485 on an Raspbery Pi post, I also picked up a LinkSprite RS485 Arduino board from RoboSavvy (Arduino RS485 schematics). I plan on trying to get the two to talk to each other, using a short bit of three cores: A aka ‘-‘ aka TxD-/RxD- aka […]
The Link Sprite RS485 GPIO Sheild for a Raspberry Pi alows you to make use of (abuse) the RS232 port in the R-Pi’s GPIO as an RS 485 Port. There are several good advantages to RS 485 over 232 and some awsome ones. RS485 is capable of both multidrop and […]