People often ask me, “Jarrett, what is the Best Thing in Life?” I’m not sure why people keep asking me this, but depending on my mood, the answer is one of two things: Floating on a lake, or swinging in a hammock. At peace with the world. Frustrated by this bounty of choice that I… Read More: Summertime, and the livin’ is easy »
The mechanical design for this project follows the “as quickly and easily as possible” maxim even more so than any other section. I used flat pack laser cut design strategies that results in pieces that snap together. I like that because it could in the future be turned into a kit reasonably easily, and in… Read More: POV Globe – The Mechanicals »
I’ve alluded to this in the past, once or twice. Power management in battery applications is pretty tricky. There are a lot of different situations, and a lot of different strategies. In the past, for the topic of this conversation, single cell Lithium polymer batteries, I’ve used a pair of Schottky diodes to automatically “select”… Read More: LiPo Systems with USB Power »
Persistence of Vision globes are a relatively simple project that everyone has to build, it seems. The fusion between mechanical, electrical, and firmware domains lead to some interesting challenges that are deceptively difficult to overcome. It’s a great project with a low barrier-to-entry, but it’s also easy to put your own spin on it. Heh.… Read More: POV Globe – The Software »
Here’s an issue that was causing me some grief: In newer versions of MPLAB X, Microchip’s IDE, My PicKit 3 clone wasn’t able to supply power anymore. Some investigation revealed that in MPLAB 8 and before, they didn’t used to properly check for “correct” voltage before attempting to continue programming. Which is great! But they… Read More: PicFix »
I’ve been working on an ESP32 module. Part of the problem I’ve been seeing with inexpensive IoT dev boards, is that the design around the power system hasn’t been very good. Here’s my attempt to fix that. This is a battery-ready module with a proper lithium battery charge circuit, lithium battery protection circuit, power supply,… Read More: uMesh »
I haven’t actually made an Internet of Things, thing, before now. This is mostly just to throw some stuff together that I already had lying around. I’ve got a DHT11 temperature/humidity sensor, a WeMos D1 Mini ESP8266 dev board, a switch-mode power supply module, and a solar panel. I turned it into an investigation on… Read More: I Made An IoT »
Shallow As a test, I designed a nautilus-themed PCB in PCBmodE. PCBmodE is not your standard ECAD package. It’s a collection of JSON files that get converted into SVG or gerber files. There are some limited tools to convert SVG files back into JSON, too. It can be thought of as forward- and back-annotation.… Read More: PCBs of Unusual Style »
In the deep, dark, depths of my project “to-do” list, I’ve always had a persistence-of-vision bicycle wheel light penciled in. I felt capable of doing it many years ago, and indeed, documenting the wiring was one of the driving forces for starting this website, but never got around to building one. Eventually, products like the… Read More: LightBeam »
Here’s a quick one. I’m tired of having to solder programming headers onto projects that don’t need them after initial development. So I bought a bag of clothespins for a couple bucks from China and went wild with some epoxy and Pogo pins. Soldering made the epoxy fail faster than I expected, so… Read More: Clipping the Leads »