Category: Blog
Build watering system for house plants. In part one of this video series, we will create a sensor that measures soil moisture, ambient temperature and light.
6 Comments
While ago I backed up a SPIDriver’s crowd supply campaign to make an open-source, open-hardware SPI tool. Even though I have plenty of professional tools to do this job, but at $30 it was worth buying this tool even if I never end up using it, right? Two weeks ago I received it in the mail and gave it a quick demo run; it looked great, worked as expected but I didn’t had a real chance to put it to the test. Last week there was an issue on the production line and few bricked units ended up on my table. Since I needed to extract data from the SPI Flash and analyze it, I though this was a perfect opportunity to put the SPIDriver to the test.
Leave a Comment
Hello everyone! I have an exciting news to announce. As you may have noticed my blog has not been very up to date or had content published on regular basis. I am very sorry for that and I promise that going forward there will be regular content published here. Also I would like to give a HUGE THANK YOU to all of you who have visited my website on regular basis looking for new content. Thank you and a virtual high-five to all of you!
Leave a CommentTL;DR: I am going to be making new projects and releasing new and interesting content on a regular basis!
Theory behind this project
Another weekend project that I’ve been working on is Wake-up light. Lately I’ve been doing more research on sleep phases and how to “hack” your brain to wake-up more refreshed and adjust your sleep cycle. There are many studies out there explaining this and providing scientific evidence, so if this is something you are interested in, I encourage you to go and get more detailed information on this subject. However I won’t go into too much detail, I’ll just try to give very simple explanation: When you sleep, you are either in REM or deep sleep (NREM) phase. When you wake up in REM phase you feel fresh, relaxed and full of energy. When you are woken up during the deep sleep phase, you feel like you’ve just been hit by a bus, and you take long time to actually wake up.
2 Comments
I kept getting more and more emails from people asking me if I could modify the firmware of the Bedroom clock I made last year to implement an easier way to adjust the time/date, so that’s what I did. In Firmware v2 H and M buttons have the following functions: H : This button will cycle selection trough hour, min,…
Leave a Comment
I’m working on a new weekend project that will be released as soon as I finish the Windows application and it will be released as open-source open-hardware project. The uber-cryptic title stands for “Power-supply Active Load tester”.
Recently I was in need for a simple device that will draw reasonably precise amount of current from my power supply unit under test and read the voltage and current draw. There are a lot of schematics and products that do just that, or you can do this just with two digital multimeters, op-amp, mosfet and potentiometer and that will probably work just fine, but I wanted to create my own version and try to improve it. 🙂
Heartbeat key-chain is intended to be a small gift that your loved one can carry with her/him wherever she/he goes.
Basically top side of the PCB is touch sensitive and has one RGB LED. When the exposed copper on the top side is touched, the microcontroller detects it and begins to pulse the LED in the heartbeat like pattern.
Bill of material, schematics and source code are available on GitHub.
I am posting render images of the PCB since I’m waiting for the Fab house to manufacture the boards for me.
2 Comments
Last week I designed a small development board for PIC18F45K50. Goal was to design a small PCB for TQFP package to give away to students and teach them how to solder and how to use this nice microcontroller from Microchip. After a while, board came back from the fabrication house and they look and works great. 🙂
2 CommentsWhile drinking my morning coffee I’ve red the article about the meaning of unique 13 numbers that people from former Yugoslavia have as their unique citizen identification number (called JMBG). I bet that more than 95% of people know what the first 6 numbers of their JMBG mean, but the other 7 numbers remain the mystery for most of them.…
2 Comments