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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
I was recently browsing eBay and a Walkman style cassette player popped up in the list. I was immediately interested as the player was a National Way RQ-WJ1 Cassette Player. These were made in the early 80's by National that later went on to become Panasonic. The asking price was AU$400.00 (about US$270.00). It was... Continue Reading →
I've noticed a lot of small storage items appearing in shops made of bamboo. I bought a pen holder and started wondering if these would make a good project case. I'm still considering that, but haven't thought of a suitable project for it. Maybe if it had a stand so that it sat at this... Continue Reading →
I recently built another clock. This time using a 16x2 LCD display with an I2C backpack. In know these displays are starting to look a bit dated, but I like them. I used a method of display large digits based on Ralph Bacon’s video #23 LCD BIG DIGITS for your Arduino using I2C - Easy!... Continue Reading →
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