A few of the things I have been up to
Most of my projects are fairly simple, low powered and run off 5V. Until recently I've used a cheap USB hub plugged into an old iPad charger. This actually worked fairly well, other than the hub connections being a bit dodgy. However, I wanted to be able to switch individual items on and off. You... Continue Reading →
Some years ago, the director of our area at work purchased a bunch of sound effects toys and gave them to staff. We had a lot of projects going on and I presume she wanted to add a bit of fun in the office. These effects toys are produced by NPW and is called the... Continue Reading →
A reader alerted me to the Tone function for Arduino. When I was making my WordPress hit counter I wanted to add in an audio alert. I preferred something other than a constant tone but thought I would have a go using the tone function. It turns out that the tone function is not implemented... Continue Reading →
One thing that I've noticed since the pandemic started is that there are far more online meetings in general and also interviews on TV where the guest joins remotely via the web. I like both of these. While not having guests travel to studios is usually fine, sometimes I feel it could easily improved if... Continue Reading →
This week I learned that 40 years ago I built my first microcontroller project used the first commercially available microcontroller and didn't realise either of those things until now. It all began for me around 1981/82 when I built an electronic musical doorbell kit for my sister. It has been in use in two different... Continue Reading →
A few years ago, I got some old metal bookends that were being thrown out. These are the bent metal type that are common in libraries. Some of them were slightly unusual in that rather than just being L shaped these had a tongue(?) going out on the bottom for extra stability. Painted in a... Continue Reading →
I love 70's HiFi speakers. Particularly the ones with the removable from panel and white cone speakers. I wanted a pair of small to medium ones for my desk, but those on ebay where either for pickup only from a far city, expensive or in poor condition. In particular the foam speaker surrounds and chipboard... Continue Reading →
When working with a project on a breadboard I've been caught with the supply voltage on the breadboard not being what I expected which resulted in the project not working as expected. To help prevent this I've bought some cheap mini 2 and 3 wire voltmeters. These sell for a couple of (AU) dollars. The... Continue Reading →
I remember seeing an ESP8266 project years ago that displayed a Youtubers subscriber count on an LED display. I was really impressed by that project. Recently I wondered if a similar thing could be done with wordpress.com stats, in this case not showing subscribers, but daily views. I did come across this response to a... Continue Reading →
In a previous post I presented how I use the DFPlayer module for playing audio files. In this one I'm going to share the code I use for the Arduino and DFPlayer to queue files. This allows files to be queued and played in sequence while the processor is doing other tasks. I've used this... Continue Reading →
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