A journal of hobbies
Over the years I’ve tinkered with a handful of those inexpensive solar garden lights. One of my earlier experiments involved swapping the standard white LED for a red one, that ended up producing a surprisingly pleasing effect. This prompted me to revisit an old challenge, getting one to run a colour changing LED without instantly... Continue Reading →
I became aware of AI generated music a few months ago and began looking for examples. I was curious what it was like to use. This week I paid for a one month subscription to the AI music generator Suno to learn more. I'm not going to give my views on AI generated music. At... Continue Reading →
A few weeks ago I went to our local Tip shop. This is a small shop run by our local council at our waste transfer station. They have donated junk and items they retrieve from waste waiting to be sold to new victims. I was surprised when I went up the back and there sitting... Continue Reading →
A few days ago I had the bright idea of using a magnetic angle sensor with an anemometer. I’ve been using a Hall effect sensor, which works fairly well, but I figured if I used an angle sensor I could take readings over a fixed time and use the number of degrees of rotation to... Continue Reading →
The first thing most of us do when learning Arduino try a blink sketch. In my quest to learn how to use cheap LCDs, I thought I’d do the same. In this case a simple animation blinking an eye. The plan was to make it display a couple of images; a closeup of an eye... Continue Reading →
I’ve been learning to use LCD displays with Arduino via the LovyanGFX library. What I wanted was a simple image converter, something that could turn a picture into a data array I could paste into my Arduino sketch and display on the screen. A standalone tool is born By Googling, I found an online one... Continue Reading →
I've been building up a small collection of LCD screens for use with Arduino projects. I've uploaded a few example sketches mostly using Bodmer's TFT_eSPI library. I found it a little challenging to set the display configuration in the library, but otherwise it worked well. There seems to be some concern that the library is... Continue Reading →
I've been thinking if there is an easy way to make a simple and cheap control knob to replace those cheap quadrature rotary encoders in Arduino projects without the need to change the Arduino code or at least very minimal changes. This would only work if the angle sensor could produce a quadrature output like... Continue Reading →
I've been experimenting with angle sensor modules to use them as a replacement for those cheap rotary encoders. I like those cheap rotary encoders, but I'm looking for something better where the knob turns smoothly and it doesn't wear out. The cheap encoders wear fairly quickly and then contact bounce can become a problem. Also,... Continue Reading →
When I was contemplating building a weather station, the part that I thought would be the most straightforward was measuring temperature. As reality often doesn't match expectations, this has not been the case. I am using a couple of DHT22 temperature and humidity sensors. One for indoor and another for outdoors. I found this Random... Continue Reading →
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