Category: Electronics
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Rogue 433MHz Transmitter
There’s a rogue transmitter broadcasting a carrier signal on 433.92Mhz somewhere in my neighbourhood. It went on the air around 4:15am yesterday. How do I know? Well, you remember my temperature/humidity sensors for my seedlings I wrote about a few days ago? I already have an entirely different system working. A few years ago I…
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Dead Wine Cooler
I bought a used wine cooler a while back. It worked great. It holds 12 bottles and uses a peltier cooler rather than a vapor-compression cooler. This makes it less efficient, but it is quiet and relatively simple for an electronics guy like me to understand. I kept some wine cool in it. Then, one…
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Sensors Part 2
Another PCB sent off for manufacturing. This one is just an assembled version of the temperature, humidity, pressure, light board I soldered up a few days ago. Hopefully it will be a bit more reliable this way. also, I chose the more expensive (and less likely to be counterfeit) BME680 sensor. The I2C addresses of…
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Ordering PCBs
My parts finally arrived at the PCB manufacturer so I was able to place the PCBA order today! These are a slightly modified Malenki Nano R/C receiver and brushed ESC. The board layout is done in KiCAD. It is exported in Gerber format and uploaded to the manufacturer, along with a bill of materials and…
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Grow Sensor
It’s almost time to plant my pepper plants. (I usually target 10-12 weeks before plant-out which is late May to early June around here.) I like to monitor and control temperature and humidity under the seedling dome. My existing sensor was giving me some problems, so I decided to wire up a replacement. This is…
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Dead Circuits
I spent today repairing some blown circuit boards. These failed for a variety of reasons — some known and some unknown. I was not hopeful about this one, but I removed this IC and cleaned up beneath it. There’s a hole in the PCB. This one isn’t getting repaired. This was probably the most impressive…
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Mailbag
I love it when packages arrive! Today I got three in the mail. First was a bag of 1104 Brushless DC Motors. These are destined to be the weapon motor in a fairyweight combat robot. Next was a couple ESCs to drive the motors. These claim to be 20A and they only weigh about 4…
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Coffee Roaster
Many years ago (2008) I started roasting my own coffee. At first, I simply put it in an air popper and let it go. It burned the beans on the outside and left the inside under-roasted. (ie, still green) BUT, it was the best cup of coffee I had ever tasted. I was hooked. I…