The Makery
Category
24
I was soldering some of my displays to test a new fan, then got sidetracked generating sine waves on them, and the result looks sick. The displays are amazing to work with, and the CPUs have absolutely nothing to do while driving them.
20
I wanted to put sensors in my basement, which is five floors away from my flat and has no network or mains access, so I looked into battery-powered ESP32s sending their readings up to me over LoRa. I had no experience with LoRa or antennas, so I bought two Heltec WiFi LoRa 32 V4 boards to get a baseline, plus a LilyGO T-Deck that was on sale, and found that ESPHome's packet transport component does exactly what I need. It works: I can report from the basement all the way up to the fourth floor.
19
I built a small ESP32 based voice recorder so I can take notes quickly: I press a button, it records audio, and when I am near a PC it transfers the audio over Bluetooth and transcribes it automatically. Startup is instant, and the Bluetooth transfer ended up very reliable and fast. The one thing still fighting me is the power side, where the MOSFET that is meant to cut all the power off does not do its job.
18
I set out to convert a cheap analog clock so it could be driven over WiFi, inspired by a couple of existing projects. My first attempt seemed broken because the second hand crawled around a degree at a time, so I eventually gave up on it and bought a second clock. Putting a battery in that one first revealed the real problem: the movement sweeps rather than ticks. I pulled the old clock's circuit back out of the trash, measured it on an oscilloscope, replicated the pulse pattern in firmware, and got it working.
08
This is my second PCB ever: a two layer board for JLCPCB packing three blocks of 42 LEDs, each LED wired to a separate pair out of 7 pins. I dropped my track width from 0.2mm down to 0.1mm to fit everything without long detours, after using the 0.25mm default on my first board. Before the PCB I built a proof of concept with three VU style 10 LED bars driven from PIO, which confirmed that the LEDs were addressed correctly and that intensity control worked.
03
A short exchange about repairing a PCB with LEDs on it, where the traces are fine enough that a simple bodge is not obviously the answer. I am planning to fix up the design and tweak it, though I am not sure yet whether the repair will end up needing the whole column rewired.
01
I built a simple LED costume piece, an anglerfish style lure on a stick, deliberately limited to nothing more than an LED, a battery and a resistor, with the battery hidden under tape on my skull and about 30cm of wire running up and back. I had wanted the LEDs to light up when two of us got close to each other, but there was no time to work that out before the event.