A journal of hobbies
My main Arduino project for the last few months is trying to design and build a monitor that wirelessly sends an alert to the house when mail has been delivered in the mailbox or a vehicle goes through the front gate. I wanted the sender unit to be solar powered and use an ESP32. Reed... Continue Reading →
Finding a comfortable mattress seems to be a bigger challenge than I thought it should. Our first mattress was a foam mattress made of several pieces of different types of foam bonded together. It lasted many years and I remember it as being very comfortable. It's been difficult to find anything as comfortable since. Perhaps... Continue Reading →
Update 14 April 2024: I've discovered that it is not necessary to calculate bitmask values for the ext1 external wakeup with the ESP32. There are predefined definitions that you can use. If you are interested check out my post ESP32: Wakeup from multiple GPIO sources and using predefined pin definitions instead of bitmask I'm currently... Continue Reading →
So you have a sensor connected to your microcontroller. How do you calibrate it, particularly if the values from the sensor are not linear? That's a problem I have thought about before and it came up again yesterday when I wanted a project to monitor a battery voltage level. The current project that I am... Continue Reading →
Mail delivery has become more important for us in recent years than it ever has been. While many communications have become electronic, more of the goods our family buy are purchased online as the option to buy locally is limited and in some cases is reducing. We are in a rural mail delivery area. There... Continue Reading →
We have had a vege garden going on and off for over 30 years and we grow corn most years. When I checked the corn the other day I saw something I had not seen before. All the husks and corn kernels had been neatly removed from a cob of corn. There were ants on... Continue Reading →
If I said I lived in a small city you would probably have a misconception about the size of the place. While it is called a city it only has a population of around 20 000. In most places of this size it would be considered a rural town. There are some advantages and disadvantages... Continue Reading →
In 2006 just a few years after completing a course that included some VBA programming for Excel, I hit on the idea of using Excel to create a Text Adventure / Interactive Fiction game builder. I spent spare time for a year on it. It worked but there was more than I wanted to do,... Continue Reading →
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 →
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