I had my first working system that I felt confident enough in to share with my neighbors - I emailed the tenant mailing list and offered to set it up for a few people without any charge except for the Raspberry Pi 3 hardware (~ 80€...
Here is peek at the initial control box for the bot. The ultimate goal for Lawnny is to make a good portion of it autonomous, but in the meantime I want to debug all the mechanicals without a lot of hassle, so the initial version of the control system...
First Light accomplished. What did I learn?The circuit in its current iteration,1: gets hot alarmingly quickly2: is trying to draw more power than I can actually supply. Those seem related, yeah. apologies for the excessively american temperature...
Revision 0.3 of the induction driver creates a plasma toroid that's stable and controllable, and does so without overheating. I'm closing in on a finalized version of the driver. Soon, both the induction coil and driver circuit will be unified into a...
Hello all, I got the first board assembled! Everything seems to come together really nicely. I am missing one differential driver, but I will get another one soon. Let the coding begin! With a display it looks even better!
I found out that the OV5647 cameras I bought are not supported using the Jetson Nano. Or any Jetson for that matter. Although those cameras should be supported by the Raspberry Pi and it's Raspberry Pi OS, they are not supported out of the box on the...
Bottom Line Up Front Was it a $5 part? I don’t recall. It’s just a USB serial adaptor. Look mom, there’s a Tx and Rx pin. What more is there to say? Next. TL;DR My point: We should not take our systems, devices, and components for granted. It’s...
I carefully opened a TI-55 donor unit and inserted a 27ohm resistor in series with one of the digit cathodes. I captured the display sequence on my trusty LeCroy oscilloscope and dumped to the built-in thermal printer - TI-55 LED...
I like the STM32 ARM cortex MCU family. They are well documented, readily available, and cheap 'breakout boards' for them abound. The MCU retrofit must fit nicely in the space of a 28-pin 0.6" pitch DIP, so package size is key. The STM32F103 is...
The TI-57 has a multiplexed 12-digit common cathode LED display. The corresponding 8 segments of all 12 digits are connected together; sort of. It turns out that TI economized on IC package pins by ”doubling up” the decimal point segment...
The display driver includes a command to invert the display and I have included a facility to choose an inverted display in the Settings app. I am still undecided as to which setting is more readable, however after implementing the analog clock app shown...
The big hacker day was upon us and the gears were in motion! Julia jumped into action during morning solo hacker time. She went to the Mission Fabric Outlet store to find our throne-worthy textiles, as well as coordinating with a participant...
To make the display work on revision 1, I bypassed the display driver and wired the pico IO pins strait to the segment LEDs. It is a little faint, as the display driver circuit worked completely differently, but it works to test the display.
Starting project by learning more about eggs.. I'd like to figure out how to create a nice 3D printed egg shape that can hold a circuit board, battery, and motor assembly. I'll start by printing off some free variants from thingiverse. Ultimately I want...
I started writing some programs to control the DRV8825 using a few small embedded boards I had lying around - the Metro by Adafruit and Arduino Uno both of which are based on the ATMEGA328P processor. I went with these because I wanted something...