Author: somethingnew

  • Okay, I didn’t

    Okay, I didn’t

    I didn’t actually do anything with the sponge. Sorry about that. I CADded up the chassis for my silly combat robot. It will be 4WD with 4 N20 motors and 1/2″ x 2.25″ foam wheels. The chassis and the wheel hubs will be 3D printed. So, after printing the chassis and wheel hubs I decided…

  • C’est Une Éponge

    C’est Une Éponge

    Tomorrow I’m going to do something interesting with this sponge.

  • Channel Hopping

    Channel Hopping

    Channel hopping is working!!! That’s basically all the hard stuff. Now I just have to make it do simple things like store the bound TX in eeprom, process the sticks data and drive the motor controllers via PWM. (That’s the four sticks data in the image.)

  • Coding

    Coding

    I started writing my own firmware, from scratch, for the Malenki. I want to use them with a HK-T6A V2 transmitter, which uses the AFHDS protocol not the AFHDS 2A protocol the Malenki uses. Despite the similar name, they are entirely not compatible at the firmware level. (But, fortunately, use the same radio hardware.) It…

  • Burgers

    Burgers

    For the first time in months I fired up the grill today. Yes, it’s still unseasonably cold and there is still a lot of snow. The burgers were good.

  • Wine

    Wine

    I bottled a carboy of wine yesterday. I buy a few 5 gallon buckets of fresh juice each fall. Last fall’s juice is ready to bottle now. I washed my bottles well months ago, but still gave them a quick rinse. and spray some metabisulphite in to sanitize. I racked the wine to a clean…

  • Malenki Nano-Plus

    Malenki Nano-Plus

    I have a Malenki Nano-plus PCB. I have a Serial UPDI programmer. I have successfully flashed Arduino “Blink” onto my Nano-plus. The final step is flashing the actual Nano-plus firmware onto the Nano-plus. I used a docker container for the dev environment. Then I copied prog.py from my Arduino install. (actually the megaTinyCore files) The…

  • Serial UPDI

    Serial UPDI

    I built a Serial UPDI programmer. (For a certain definition of “built”) These are pretty simple. A diode goes between Tx and Rx on a CH340 module. Then a wire from Rx goes to the device being programmed. I’m also using a SOICbite (slightly modified SOP8 test clip) as a programming clip. So, I used…

  • Seedlings

    Seedlings

    The peppers (and Tomatillos) are coming along nice. I’ll probably have to start transplanting a few soon. The last row was some fairly old habanero seeds. They are the only ones where none came up.

  • Testing a new PCB

    I have to be vague when posting stuff about work, but this is an older design that we are still using. I just had a fresh batch made and need to do some testing on the bench before installing them in the final product. So far so good.