I feel like the dumbest person in the room. This is what I wanted grad school to be like, and I have finally found it. I love it. I have been unbelievably blown away by the quality of the people here at SU. It is incredible to hear what people have created so far, and…
I had designed and then ordered a PCB for my interpretation of a protoboardunio, as a first PCB design experiment. I had used the good service at OSH Park to make the order, and they arrived today! OSHPark effectively uses a specific colour purple as their brand, and so the envelope of course came in…
I am now more through the Udemy Arduino Step by Step course, and have a few more takeways: Cool sensors: the membrane potentiometer and the flex sensor are cool. For pots, they have three pins, so you don’t need a second resistor to create the voltage divider. But the flex sensor only has two pins,…
I have done some soldering over the course of my relearning how to make, but I didn’t do so deliberately or with really decent instruction. I found a really fantastic video series on soldering, which looks like it was from the 60s or so: Covers all the basics, and I learned a fair amount from it.…
I signed up for the Arduino Step by Step course from Udemy, and have now got partway through it (25%!). It is pretty good, and I wanted to summarize my key lessons learned: Sensors: the course walked through a bunch of them, but most of them are pretty straight forward or I had used before.…
While I feel like I have managed to become reasonably knowledgeable about programming Arduinos, and experiences such as at Startup Weekend and with Code for DC have validated my knowledge base and skill, I know there is a tremendous amount that I still have yet to learn. Moreover, I feel like I have learned sporadically,…
So I purchased a few $5 (or less) Wifi chips off of ebay, the ESP8266. It has taken the maker world a little by storm, as it makes is super cheap to get wifi into a project. You can use it as a standalone microprocessor, but to start I wanted just to use it as…
Stumbled across a great intro to prototyping thanks to an article at Makezine, about billionaire Dan Gelbart. He has a cool set of tools in his basement, and has great instructions for how to build stuff. Check out the YouTube intro and the YouTube Channel. Lessons I liked a lot were on forming plastic molds, and on building…
After I completed the prototype of the bag movement alarm I spent some time turning it into something that is more of a usable product. I designed a layout to fit onto a protoboard PCB that I got with a small project case I purchased, and then soldered it up and stuck it in the project…
After figuring out the modified power circuit and the battery power monitor circuit, I could finally finish the prototype of the bag movement alarm. I also added the same power switch circuit for the speaker, which allowed me to use a much better speaker (when I had tried it before with the old power circuit, it beeped…
For the bag movement alarm project, I wanted to be able to monitor the battery level so I can warn the user when they need to change the battery. A simple way to do this is just to monitor the voltage of the battery, as batteries have a pretty well articulate discharge curve: with more…
When I integrated the TrinketPro into the bag movement alarm prototype project, the power circuit did not work. So I needed to redesign the power circuit. I had posted a question about this in the Arduino.cc forum, where forum user dlloyd had helpfully pointed me to an excellent explanation of using MOSFETs as power switches.…
Now that I have the TrinketPro working fine, and have the sketch and prototyped circuit for the bag movement alarm project using an Uno, I wanted to replace the Uno with the TrinketPro. There were a few small changes, as there are two pins on the TrinketPro that are not available: #2 and #7. Since…
As part of the hackaday.io Everyday Carry contest that I am (in part) building the bag movement alarm for, I need to utilize a Trinket Pro. Which is fine, because the product itself is a pretty affordable ~$10, and it packs pretty much to same punch as an Arduino Uno. I ordered one from the…
I had previously developed the power circuit, then added the 4 buttons and the speaker to build a button based secret code system, but I had developed the algorithm to use the accelerometer to determine if the device had moved enough to be considered stolen as a separate element. So I needed to integrate them together.…
Discovering my makerself 