I have lost my way in the world of software and its now time to brush the dust off my interest in building hardware
I became interested in a LED display I saw in a beer garden over Summer. The remarkable thing was that it was clearly LEDs on a bus of only two wires. Even so the LEDs were able to be animated such that they could blink in unison or every other alternatively. I was intrigued as … Continue reading Bidirectional LED Driver
I have looked into using Neo-pixels strips and I was really impressed with the simplicity of use. Now I was curious about controlling a matrix of individual, non-addressable RGB LEDs. So I searched out a LED Matrix driver that looked like it could handle RGB LEDs. My search ended with the IS31FL3736 12×8 DOTS MATRIX … Continue reading RGB LED Controller
I have been looking into developing a device to monitor a solar charging unit. This would be a remote sensor and relay the information back to a base to be presented on a user interface. There are a lot of elements to this type of project and one problem I have been thinking about was … Continue reading Trying out the INA219
Playing with some animations of the single LEDs strip of my NeoPixel board was nice but the thoughts soon come to mind: “It would look better if there were more strips”, “…if there were more strips, how could they be coordinated”, to “Could I still use the ATiny1614?”. To take this project further, I considered … Continue reading Expanding the NeoPixel Project
Introduction I have written about the Timed LED Lighting Controller in previous posts. Starting with the original entry “Stairwell Foot Lighting System”. In this entry I will be wrapping up the project and describing the change of direction from the initial design and layout. There may be a bit of overlap but it will be … Continue reading Wrapping up the Timed LED Lighting Controller Project
For a while now I have been intrigued with Integrated Light Sources i.e. NeoPixels. I knew nothing about them and with the coming of Christmas, I was inspired to take a closer look. I knew I would not have anything in place before Christmas 2017. But there is always next year. Design I wanted my … Continue reading A Look into Integrated Light Sources
It has always been on my list to try a project with some wireless communication. I now have a project in mind but there are a few things to sort out first. I have not worked with any wireless at the embedded hardware level. This is not inteded to be any instructional post but my … Continue reading An Encounter with XBee
In the last entry for the Timed LED Lighting Controller, I realised that there are no working examples of an I²C driver for the ATtiny20. I then had to work through the data sheet to implement my own. With that done, I could then start on the application firmware and get the board really working. So … Continue reading From Proof of Concept to Prototype
In this post I describe the trials an tribulations of bringing up my Timed LED Lighting Controller and how I went about implementing my first I²C Slave Driver for the ATTiny20. I was keen to receive the boards for the Timed LED Lighting controller to know if they would fit in the chosen housing. The … Continue reading Back to Blinky
In the last post for the Timed LED Lighting Controller, I had figured out the circuit and a basic layout and approach that I was happy with. That is to separate the hazardous voltage from the control circuitry by putting it on a separate board. But still, this was not enough. I need to assemble … Continue reading “Mocking” – Minimising Risk
Rebooting Electronics 