I have finally found some time last weekend to finalize my smart hot water tank controller project, finalized the code and have it now running for a week. I also put up a small and simple html page to control…
I am working on a smart IoT controller for my solar hot water tank and I need to be able to control its mode of operation over the Internet. My plan is to have the controller subscribe to an emonCMS…
I did a fun experiment this evening, clap controlling RF power sockets using Funky v2‘s radio module and a sound sensor breakout module. The latter is pretty cheap one, respectively low quality and performance: It has couple outputs: analog…
I have recently purchased a magnetic contact switch to toy with. These are really cheap sensors that are used to detect door (or window) opening/closing events. The principle of work is simple, the sensor consists of two parts: one is…
When you run a project on battery, you are always thinking on how to conserve power so that you run longer. In the case of wireless remote nodes you do that by sleeping a lot and only waking up briefly to…
Alex from insideGadgets had an interesting project last year on non-contact AC detection and I wanted to try it out and learn how it works. He hooked one leg of a 1M ohm resistor to GND and a wire to…
I purchased a Ciseco bistable/latching relay few months ago for the sake of trying it out. I don’t have a particular project that requires one, just wanted to toy with it. If you haven’t heard of this type of relays,…
When interfacing my gadgets to the physical world, I often need to deal with IR of all sorts: air conditioners, TV, audio equipment, media center and so forth. These are all of different brand, so naturally the IR protocol that…
My father had a leaking pipe accident last year, and it happened while he was away from his place for a week. The water was flowing for few days before he returned and that caused damage for thousands of Euro,…
I have made a small improvement to the Funky v2 by adding a reset button to the PCB. The lack of reset button in the previous releases caused some inconvenience when the sketch being run disables USB connectivity (for power-saving…
I have been experimenting the last couple days with a wearable electronics project – a wireless body temperature monitor/logger. The idea is to remotely monitor kids body temperature, if they are sick, and put up a status display with alarm…
I have updated my OLED status display project with an option for analog clock: I also experimented with drawing bitmaps, a thermometer is drawn to the right of the clock face that changes its reading according to the solar water…
@Dimitrios noted something very important in the comments to an earlier my post on low-power sketch: One of the things I noticed when I started playing with the RFM12B module was that the receiver front end was mostly overloaded by…
I sometimes need to quickly check on certain temperature reading and find myself walking to one of my status displays to see, for example, if there will be enough solar hot water for a hot tub. I figured, it would…
I have been uneasy with the conversion time that the DS18B20 temperature sensors have, it is 750 ms when using the 12-bit resolution: The 12-bit resolution is the default power-on, so when powering the sensor from a digital pin, you…
I purchased a small serial OLED display few weeks ago, it showed up yesterday at the mail box. Dimensions of the PCB are (WxHxD):30x28x4.8mm (1.2X1.1×0.19″) and the display itself is 22x12mm with 128×64 pixels. Pixels are really bright and viewing…
I have finally found some time today to put my keypad project into work, namely I decided to use it for weight logging project here a home. The idea is simple: take measurement using the bathroom scale, then punch in…
In an effort to make the Funky v2 even easier to use, I decided to make it appear as a standard LilyPad Arduino USB by using the same USB VID/PID pair. This will enable using it with Arduino IDE without needing…
Timer 4 on the ATMega32U4 is a high speed one, but I have never tried it out before. Now that I have a scope, I decided to toy with it. It can work from the internal PLL, meaning some really high frequencies…
I have recently added a MOSFET to Funky v2 so it can control the power state of the RFM12B module. This was done in an attempt to allow starting up from a gradually rising power source, like the LTC3108 energy…
I haven’t been able to use my miniature nodes the Funky v1 or Funky v2 with my energy harvesting board yet, in the means of plug-and-forget type of solution. Basically the issue is that we have a slowly rising voltage from…
I have previously created a DIY soil moisture sensor, but wiring it required couple resistors. I was recently reading a post by JCW on using a light sensor and figured I could simplify my setup using the same basic idea…
The Funky v2 loaded with my low power test code that I described here has stopped sending transmissions yesterday. The Funky v2 was powered by a fresh CR2032 battery with 220mAh capacity. I use an integer counter that overflowed few…
I wish I did this for April 1st, but here is it anyway 🙂 I wanted to test out the HID keyboard features of the Arduino Leonardo compatible Funky v2, so during my research on the subject I accidentally stumbled…
The Funky v2 is so small in size, that only few pins are available on the side header. This is because its main purpose is to interface with one, at most couple sensors while running on battery. The hardware TWI/I2C…
I have always wanted to connect my remote RFM12B -based nodes to the Internet, I have finally managed to do so. It was relatively easy, based on the excellent work of Adam Neilsen with his SerialIP library SerialIP is a port…
I have consolidated my accumulated so far experience on running the ATmega32U4+RFM12B based Funky v2 in low power mode in this example sketch. I managed to bring the power consumption down to 0.04mA, which makes it possible for the Funky v2 to run on…
When designing low-power code for the ATmega32U4-based Funky v2 (code, optimized for running on battery power), it is important to power down all unused peripherals as soon as possible in the code. The USB circuitry draws significant amount of power, so naturally…
This is something I long wanted to try out – frequency counting with my Funky v2. I used Albert’s Arduino frequency counter library for the purpose. I’d test it by doing 6 kHz PWM and try to count that. The interrupt…
Funky v2 enumerates as a CDC device when plugged in to your Raspberry Pi without the need of any driver, so it is pretty easy to get it working as a RFM2Pi board. Useful If you decide that for some reason…
Apparently, as I have found out, the MCP1703 will leak current if voltage applied to the output gate and nothing on the input, while the MCP1700 does not. This is the case, when you power the Funky v2 from a CR2032…
I have confirmed by suspicion that the on-board LDO voltage regulator is to blame for my troubles as described yesterday. I experienced the exact same situation with battery powered Funky v2 high sleep current as @Capnbry describes here, so I…