Have you ever wanted a marquee display to output your latest message to people walking past your business or office? Or perhaps a display to show you the temperature or time at a moment’s notice would be useful to you.
This can and has certainly be done with the right combination of dev board, display, communications hardware, and programming. For an all-in-one solution, however, Armtronix is offering a WiFi sensor board along with a 32×16 display and power supply in a convenient kit. The sensor board includes the same ATmega328P microcontroller used in the Arduino Uno (and many other applications), along with the an ESP8266 module for communications.
As seen in the video below, the setup is ideal for receiving text from a smartphone and displaying it, and includes a RTC and headers for a variety of sensors. This means you’re not restricted just to static text, or even info pulled from external sources for your array of 512 LEDs.
The promise of the Internet of Things is to allow our devices to achieve new levels of connectivity and communication. Giving your device a direct line to the cloud can take it to the next level. This Blaze IoT development board combines Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and IMU functionality into one package.
It functions as an add-on to the Blaze platform or as a means of adding connectivity to your maker project. Blaze is another design from Tindie seller roobit that functions as a miniature development board for wearables and IoT applications.
It features an ESP8266 ESP-03 module for Wi-Fi capability and the option to connect your project to the cloud. The HM-11 Low Energy Bluetooth module will give you the option to link your smartphone or another Blaze IoT board.
The LSM9DS1 sensor on the board combines an accelerometer, magnetometer, and gyroscope into a single 9dof IMU sensor. Despite all of these components, the Blaze IoT board maintains a miniature form factor.
The measurement is 41x44mm, which will fit perfectly into embedded applications. The external IO connections have a 0.1″/2.54mm pitch, which makes them breadboard and Veroboard compatible. Power switching between the BLE module, Wi-Fi module, and IMU sensor is controlled independently via the external IO. This allows you to save power when needed.
Even if you don’t plan on using this development board as a Blaze add-on, the included modules allow you to add cloud connectivity, Bluetooth support, and even motion tracking to your projects.
Soldering is a skill that nobody’s born with (although that would be nice). If you plan on becoming a DIY maker with any kind of electronics, it’s a skill you’ll need to pick up sooner than later. But don’t work, it’s fun and rewarding to learn the ways of the melted solder. here’s a fun way to start. The LED dice from E-Radionica is a DIY solder kit that helps beginners learn this valuable skill.
This educational kit lets you create a portable LED die (the single version of dice) from scratch while learning basic soldering skills. On the back of the device, a CR2032 battery lets you take the die with you on-the-go. There are a total of 7 LEDs and a large pushbutton on the device.
This board is based on an Attiny85 microcontroller. The code is available on GitHub and if you want to make the board do different things than the stock firmware, it is possible to reprogram this chip using an Arduino board.
Relays are something of a necessary evil in the electronics world. While LEDs and other very low power devices can be controlled directly by microcontroller outputs, if you want to switch motors, incandescent lights, and other power hungry items, you’ll need some way to handle current separately.
Mechanical relays do a good job of isolating the switched device from what controls it, but they have a few disadvantages like eventually wearing out. They also make a clicking noise which may or may not be an issue for your application. Solid-state relays, or SSRs, contain no moving parts, and accomplish the same type of power switching with a much longer life cycle and without any noise.
If you’d like to add SSRs your Arduino or Raspberry Pi projects, this 16-channel relay board from Megahome is a great solution. Each relay can handle over 2000W, and the board operates via I2C, meaning you only need two pins to control all 16 outputs. Also, each output is indicated by an LED for easy troubleshooting. Check out the video below to see it switch 16 of what appear to be small incandescent light bulbs on and off, forming a slow and very bright KITT/Cylon display. You might note that there’s no clicking noise, just beautiful glowing lights!
The 4 lines in a USB interface carry both data and power and are normally always on, but what if you wanted to turn some of them off? USB-Helper lets you control exactly what is being transmitted between connected devices.
From a user side of things, this can be useful when charging a device on an unknown PC or public kiosk. You may not know if the device is scanning for data, or contains malware. But this little pass-through lets you switch off the 2 data lines (D+ and D-) on the USB-Helper to protect from snooping power sources.
On a more hacker-side of things, this is handy for testing and troubleshooting. If the sound from a USB audio systems is bad it might be where the PC injecting noise and humming into the sound. By switching off the 5V-line from the USB interface, you can remove this issue entirely. If you’re developing USB devices, it’s great to test failure modes when any of these four lines become disconnected.
The USB-Helper is compatible with USB 1.0 and 2.0 devices. If you choose to purchase the kit option, some soldering will be required. There is also an option for a complete version with a 3D-printed case shown below.
When you’re pushing your Arduino to render graphics, the hardware side of things can get pretty messy. Building the keyboard interface and TVout on a breadboard is a potential solution, but you can run into problems like loose connections and data problems from breadboard capacitance. Dylan Brophy of the Nuclaer Tech store on Tindie has this problem licked.
The NGT30 is an Arduino Desktop Shield that circumvents many of these problems to streamline your development process. It has a keyboard port, VGA output, and advanced rendering functions to ensure a high FPS for your games or other graphics needs. The Propeller chip on the shield takes the heavy lifting off of the Arduino.
It’s capable of rendering basic text and color graphics to a VGA monitor, but it can also make 3D lines for rendering meshes, and you can store sprites for quick rendering later.
The GPU only uses two Arduino pins. Each pin can be selected to avoid conflicts. It’s a simple and elegant solution to a complex hardware problem. If you want to follow along with development, check out the details of the project over on Hackaday.io.
LayerOne is May 25th-28th in Pasadena, California and we want to see you there! The LayerOne information security conference began back in 2004. This conference brings a diverse selection of speakers and topics to a single place. There’s a focus on technology, but also the social impact of things like networking, hardware, cryptography, and much more.
Supplyframe, Tindie’s parent company, is proud to support both the 2018 LayerOne conference this year and the wonderful community of makers who attend. Supplyframe’s annual sponsorship of LayerOne goes back to 2015, and has included sponsored the electronic badges for the event each year.
Last year’s badge was an incredible creation that featured enough computing power to emulate games, hack CAN bus, and even included a 2.4″ LCD screen. It sold out quickly on Tindie, so we are all eager to see what design they come up with for this year’s badge! Tickets are on sale now, with several options for various workshops being held at the conference in addition to general admission.
If you can’t make it this year, all of the talks will be uploaded to the LayerOne YouTube channel. You can also view talks from prior years as well. We hope to see you there!
The 2018 Demoscene Party
A big part of LayerOne is the annual demoscene party. Each year, competitors are challenged to utilize a LayerOne Demoscene Board which places a number of constraints on the code size, memory, and processor speed. Given this canvas, they create an output of audio and video that pushes the limits of what is possible with the hardware.
Anyone with an interest in C, assembly, graphics, or embedded systems programming should absolutely try their hand at this year’s competition. Remote entries are welcome for those who cannot make it in person.
The 2018 Demoscene Party begins Saturday, May 26th at 6:00PM in the Chillout Room.
This year’s LayerOne Demo Board, sold exclusively through Tindie, is a 16-bit PIC24F chip with 96K RAM, and 256K Flash/ROM. If you’re looking for inspiration, check out this video of last year’s demoparty:
Portability is an amazing feature for any project, but it comes with a few caveats. There’s nothing more frustrating than finding out your battery is dead just when you need it the most. It’s time to take the guesswork out of your charge levels.
The neoPLC BAT is a handy tool that provides an estimated charge percentage using an onboard i2c battery monitor. Using a 12-bit ADC a charge charge estimate is returned using the Maxim ModelGauge algorithm. That 12-bit number is accessed via I2C (code example below).
The board also charges the cell whenever it is connected to USB. It can handle single cells yo to 4.2 V with 100mA current limiter.
The output current is limited by your battery selection. A diode protected selection circuit will cause a 0.1V drop in output. This little device will help keep your portable projects alive and well.
Add a chiptune charm to any signal with the Harmonic Engine from Circuitbenders. It’s a square-wave effects generator which follows the pitch of your sound and generates relative harmony with glorious synthesized swarms. This superb DIY project gives you the PCB and the instructions you need for construction (and subsequent sonic destruction)!
The Harmonic Engine is a faithful clone of the E&MM Harmony Generator, originally published in Electronics & Music Maker magazine from 1981. It uses a 4046 Phased Locked Loop (PLL) to generate a square wave at harmonic intervals relative to the frequency of your input sound. Plug in a guitar, microphone, or drum machine and the Harmonic Engine will sing along!
Reign in the chaos by altering the added octave from -3 to +3, and adding 3rd or 5th harmonic overtones, depending on the result you want. You’ll find it adds something to everything, but is highly recommended for percussive sounds, converting drum hits into what Circuitbenders himself describes as “some kind of warped electronic splatter”.
Once you’ve made this pocket beast you can turn your Harmonic Engine into a Eurorack module or stand-alone effect unit, with a flexible PCB for both types. It sounds like nothing else and is available now from the Circuitbenders Tindie store.
Since you’re reading this post, it’s a reasonable bet that you have at least some basic programming skills, perhaps in Python, various flavors of C, or a wide variety of other languages available today. Something a lot of programmers don’t delve into is what’s behind those programming languages. Beyond this high-level framework, what’s going on at the processor and memory level? Given the complexity of modern computers, it’s entirely understandable—likely even necessary—that we can’t be experts in every aspect of this vast subject. But it’s good to know a little bit about it.
If you would like to get more familiar with the basics, this simulated 4-bit microcomputer lets you program in machine language with a hexadecimal keypad, LCD display, and a speaker. In the video below, the device’s creator shows how to add 2+5 using BASIC, a single line of code. He then notes how to do this same operation on this trainer. Instead of a single line of code, it actually requires 8 instructions to deal with the CPU, accumulator, and actually displaying results on the LCD screen. The idea behind going through this process is that as you learn the basics, modern software concepts like pointers and references will be easier to understand.
Beyond learning, the product listing notes that most sales of this item have been to older computer programmers who appreciate the nostalgia of the device. Like Raspberry Pi retro gaming, a once-large computing system shrunk into something handheld has to be fun for those who originally used them!
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