A journal of hobbies
Back in the late 80's I built a kit that is a reminder for taking out the garbage. It was an interesting project that I originally built as a reminder to take tablets, although since then it has been mostly used as a garbage reminder. This a picture of it in the original plans. While... Continue Reading →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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