Exciting times are upon us as the last couple of years 3D printing has really taken off. Driven by a large enthusiasts community of makers a lot of innovation and broadly available DIY sets for building your own 3D printer have become available and while they utilize an inferior technology (FDM – Fused Deposition Modeling instead of …
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ESP32 Incoming!
I’ve been a fan of the ESP8266 low cost, high powered IoT platform and their makers, Espressif just announced that they’ll be introducing a new chip named the ESP32 soon. It is not just a new module with the ESP8266 on it, but a whole new chip featuring many improvements. The improvements are among others: …
On Air: Clarifying ESP8266 OTA
So those ESP8266 are awesome but I never quite figured out how to get the over the air (OTA) updating to work due to the lack of guides on how to do it. The SDK supports it and there is some decent information available on the Espressif forums, but it lacked an easy oversight on …
Anodizing Choices
For our LightSaga project we recently met up with Mr. Baas from Aldor BV, a company dedicated to anodizing and chromating aluminum. It’s amazing how many options and choices there are when it comes to anodizing aluminum, both in pre processing the material, the color selection and the finish. But what does anodizing do in the first …
The OSH Park Experience
For the LightSaga project we have designed some custom boards that will house the Photons, light sensor, some capacitors for stability and a logic level converter. Nothing too fancy but a good chance to let these prototypes be produced by OSH Park, well known for their purple PCBs. One of the really awesome features of …
LightSaga
Time for an update on the led clock project by me and Wouter Jansen. A lot of things have happened recently; We’ve send out a call to action to all the people who’ve shown interest in investing into the first prototype run and the we’re happy to announce that our first prototype run is not only …
Lighten up your ESP8266
For a workshop I’m giving at my employer I’ve been wanting to interface a nice NeoPixel (WS2812) LED ring with an ESP8266. Using the NodeMCU boards without the actual firmware provides a nice platform that gives a small packages, with breadboard ready pin spacing & USB to serial chip. It has been a struggle to …
ESP8266, MQTT & SmartConfig
Having done a lot recently with the ESP8266 and the excellent MQTT firmware by Minh Tuan I found that there was one mayor thing missing in the whole headless module setup; An easy way to configure the ESP8266 while it didn’t have Wi-Fi yet. Looking around I found some code made by YoungBuger on GitHub which is basically …
Allow me to Interrupt
Recently I had some problems with my I2C brightness sensor on my clock. It messed up the main routine of smoothly drawing the clock at a rate of 30 updates per second. Analog was a solution to this, but it didn’t solve the main problem of the design. Interrupts where the way to go if I …
Brightness, Analog > Digital
One of the annoyances with my led clock has been that it is too bright during the evening. But, that can be easily solved by adding some kind of brightness control… This is the tale of that feature. So, brightness control. There’s an awesome digital light sensor that can give you resolutions up to 16 bits …