I have lost my way in the world of software and its now time to brush the dust off my interest in building hardware
The Timed LED Lighting Control project has been driving the LEDs in our stairwell since 2017. The system is based on two modules. A custom built LED driver, which has been running faultlessly, and a Raspberry Pi + Django based user interface. This year the user interface module died. In this post, I describe the … Continue reading Upgrading the Stairwell Foot-lighting Project
When creating a PCB layout in KiCad, I often have need to add a mechanical part to the PCB layout. The easy way is to add these parts directly from within PCB New. The problem is that when updating the board from the schematic, it is possible that these extra footprints will be removed. In … Continue reading Avoiding Mechanical Parts from Disappearing in KiCad
Developing firmware for an embedded remote sensor that needs to adhere to a specific protocol has challenges due to the limited resources and the complexity of the implementation. Experience on a previous project (a remote sensor gateway) demonstrated how Test Driven Development could assist when working on complex systems. This write-up describes the approach used … Continue reading Developing a Remote Sensor Firmware using Test Driven Development
At the local open workshop ZAM, there came a project idea for a text display that is publicly available. After some experimentation with a commercially available unit - that proved to be too cumbersome for public use, we explored creating our own. In this post I describe how I adapted my original NeoPixel driver project … Continue reading Converting the NeoPixel Driver into a Text Display
An experiment is two way to write and read data to IO. This features using the MaxiMite2 to help with driving the shift registers.
Remote sensors are only one component of a much larger system. If the information they collect is to land on the internet somewhere, then there needs to be some type of bridge or gateway. In this post I take a look at using Test Driven Development (TDD) to create a simple gateway node. It is … Continue reading Creating a Gateway Node using XBee and Test Driven Development
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
Rebooting Electronics 