Since I discovered the Sonoff I've been thinking about embedding it inside a switch. I started looking for old power meters, timers,… I had at home but the Sonoff is a bit too long. Why didn't they design a square board? I event bought a bulky Kemo STG15 case with socket. Next I decided to design my own board. It is meant to be the “official” hardware for the ESPurna project so it's called ESPurna too....
I was not the first to arrive at the party but since I discovered the ESP8266 I've been enjoying it. Then I stumbled upon the Sonoff and dude was I amazed. They are cheap and so very hackable you cannot help buying them, tear them open and customize them. Sure they are not CE or UL compliant, yet. My previous post about adding a custom RF module to a Sonoff HT got some visibility as it was published at hackaday....
Yes, sure! You can buy a Sonoff RF and you are good to go, I guess. But I didn't and I was not so sure about the no-named RF receiver so I ended thinking about adding my own. But first things first. The Sonoff is an ESP8266 based smart switch by ITEAD which comes with custom firmware that communicates with the manufacturer cloud to provide “smart” capabilities like remote switching or scheduling....
Clocks are top projects for the maker community. There are tons of different ways to show or tell time. Or write time. Wordclocks are a subset of them by its own. You can find other wordclocks at instructables, for instance, or buy one from thinkgeek or from a local jewelry for just 450€. Mmm… well maybe that's a little bit on the expensive side… Recently I've been doing things with clocks and WS2812 LEDs (a....
it's been a while (ok, more than a whole year) since my last post. I could say I've been busy and it'd be true but I regret myself not writting here for so long… Anyway if you want to know what I've been doing just visit my family blog (only in spanish, sorry). Blue footed boobies (yes, I know). Nothing to do with this blog but part of our family trip....
Quick post from an old draft, mainly as documentation. A 9600Hz oscillator circuit based on a 2.4576MHz crystal and a 74HC590 binary counter. The idea was to reproduce the set up from robotroom.com site with a bar crystal but I had some trouble making it work. The solution came from this document about crystal oscillator circuits that describes different circuits depending on the crystal frequency. Here you have the schema and a picture of the circuit:...
PCB etching is another big topic in the electronics DIY world. It's something every electronics tinkerer ends up trying sooner o later. Even thou it's a fairly simple procedure it requires some self confidence (or bravery) since it involves strong, smelly and hazardous chemicals. Any etching procedure you read about can be described in 5 different steps: designing, transferring, etching, assembly and reuse or disposal. For every one of these five steps there are different options and there are thousands of web pages with instructions, recommendations, how-to's… well, this is yet another one of those pages :)...
The Rentalito is a never ending project. It began as a funny project at work using an Arduino UNO and an Ethernet Shield, then it got rid of some cables by using a Roving Networks RN-XV WIFI module, after that it supported MQTT by implementing Nick O’Leary’s PubSubClient library and now it leaves the well known Arduino hardware to embrace the powerful Spark Core board. Spark Core powered Rentalito - prototype Spark Core The Spark Core is a development board based on the STM32F103CB, an ARM 32-bit Cortex M3 microcontroller by ST Microelectronics, that integrates Texas Instruments CC3000 WIFI module....
My older daughter (she's 4 years) loves drawing. My younger daughter (she's 1 year old) loves doing whatever her sister does. So last Christmas the three wise men carried a new kids table for them. The “old” one was quite abused already. You get to know how tough things are when you let a kid play with them for a while… Anyway we had already thought about a second life for it....
I have recently started a couple of projects based on the great Spark Core board. Hopefully I will be able to talk about them here soon. The Spark Core (courtesy of spark.io) The Spark Core is a development board based on the STM32F103CB, an ARM 32-bit Cortex M3 microcontroller by ST Microelectronics (the same you can find in the new Nucleo platform by ST) that was crowd-funded through a kickstarted campaign....
