Testing the new Funky v2’s low power modes early this morning, I got a constant draw of 3mA, no matter the sleep mode and power saving techniques used.. “Drat, and double drat!” I hope it is a software thing, not a hardware…
Funky v2 – finally
I got the revised Funky v2 PCBs yesterday and just finished putting together one. It is a painful (eye-hurting too) process, since I do the soldering by hand. It took me 1.5hrs to build this one, I will have to come up…
RGB LED
I’ve never played with RGB LEDs before, got myself couple to try out on Funky v2. The Funky v2 only has 1 pin with PWM, so I used the SoftPWM library instead: An Arduino library to produce PWM signals on…
Energy harvesting breakout board
I have put up a small LTC3108 breakout board based on Robert’s design that I also tested out. A re-cap for those that didn’t follow my energy harvesting posts: The LTC3108 is a highly integrated DC/DC converter ideal for harvesting and managing…
Raspberry Pi TFT board
I enjoy my DIY TFT board so much that I decided to create a more permanent setup. I laid out a board design that will have non-rectangular shape and supposedly fit better on-top the Pi. Here is how it…
Using my 1.8 TFT as a Raspberry Pi status display
I have been experimenting with my Raspberry Pi TFT display these few days with the intention to use it as a misc status display, heavily influenced by Mark‘s work. I collect most of my house’s telemetrics to an emoncms installation running on…
New RFM2Pi board in the works
Glyn Hudson and I have been working on a new RFM2Pi board revision, nothing revolutionary, just a small upgrade. The most important features of the board are: Atmega328 based, has more memory and hardware serial support Runs on the internal…
Funky v2 gets its own USB VID/PID pair
As with every USB device out there, the Funky v2 needs an unique Vendor ID and Product ID combination so that it is recognized and USB compliant. Unfortunately, purchasing a Vendor ID costs fortune and is out of the question…
433Mhz OOK with Funky v2 to remotely control power sockets
Here is a 15 minute project: control 433Mhz RF sockets with the Funky v2: I have a 433Mhz OOK transmitter/receiver, I don’t even recall where I got them. These are widely available on ebay for less than $5 delivered. I…
Receiving IR with Funky v2
I ran a quick test today to see how Ken Shirriff’s IR library behaves on the Funky v2. One of the things I noticed in my current design is that I don’t have a pin with timer output routed to…
Power saving techniques on the Atmega32u4
Now that I have a Funky 2 prototype, I can toy with what I am most interested in: reducing power usage so that the Funky can operate on battery as long as possible. I have achieved amazing results with an…
Funky v2 (well almost)
I’ve finally put together an Atmega32u4-based USB Funky late yesterday. Soldering the QFN44 chip and 0402 sized elements wasn’t as hard as I thought, I did it myself: Of course, there had to be issues, namely I have swapped the MOSI/MISO…
1.8″ TFT LCD display on Raspberry Pi
[edit] This project is now available for sale in the store I figured my cheap 1.8″ TFT display is useless on an Arduino as it pretty much eats the available memory (20K for simple sketches), so I decided to try it…
Using the LTC3108 breakout board with a TEG
As I mentioned already, I burned my old Peltier element before receiving the LTC3108 breakout PCB, so I couldn’t test that setup. So I went and hooked a solar cell, but the configuration I have on the PCB is not optimal…
Using the LTC3108 breakout board with a solar cell
EDIT: I used the wrong solar cell in this experiment, using a single solar cell 0.5V the supercap charges fully for less than 45 min I wired my LTC3108 breakout board this morning to a 120x80mm solar cell, shamelessly scavenged…
Energy harvesting
I have mentioned before my interest in energy harvesting, and have decided to try Robert’s LTC3108 breakout board. The Funky sensor is all about low power, so it is an ideal candidate for battery-less low power node. I got the…
Toying with a 1.8″ TFT LCD display
I got myself a 1.8″ TFT LCD display from ebay, attracted by the low price. The display also has a SD card slot. It comes without any documentation and you are presented the joys of figuring out how to drive it…
Hot water usage analysis
I thought it would be interesting to analyze our hot water usage, at this stage this is just for fun, but maybe in the future to make more it energy efficient. During the winter, I use my heat pump to…
2boots bootloader on the uIoT: Serial + MMC bootloader in 2Kb
The 2boots bootloader is a lovely bootloader, developed by Thomas Seiler that is Just 2kb of flash, fits into normal 2kb bootblock of most atmega chips Serial (stk500v1) bootloader, compatible with avrdude and Arduino IDE Additional MMC bootloader, can read…
Raspberry Pi as IP webcam
I noticed this Instructable the other day and had to try it since I had an old USB web cam laying around. I found that the instructions contained some inaccuracies, here are my steps: sudo apt-get install motion sudo nano /etc/motion/motion.conf Locate…
Plotting my daily travel habbits
Now that I log my location and distance from home, I can visualize this data; Below is a 5-day log on my daily trips – I live around 20km away from the city: I am still not using this data in home…
emonGLCD
Glyn from OpenEnergyMonitor surprised me pleasantly the other day by sending me an emonGLCD unit to evaluate – thanks! Building it was easy, and an hour later I had it working. Quite nice piece of hardware, a must-have for home monitoring…
Optiboot on the micro IoT gateway
The uIoT gateway shield has FTDI plug that I used mostly for serial debugging, while for programming I used a clone of the USBTiny programmer. I wanted to adapt optiboot for the uIoT gateway, as that will make it easier for…
Update on the Atmega32u4 based new Funky
I haven’t had the time to follow up on the Atmega32u4 based new Funky, I now have finalized the board layout (I think). This has been quite a learning experience for me, I only started work on a remote node with this…
Testing the micro IoT gateway shield
As I ordered the wrong magjack for the uIoT gateway, I couldn’t test the Ethernet connectivity yesterday. I only could test that the Atmega328 talks to the ENC28J60 and ran a LED blink sketch. Today I decided to test out the shield…
uIoT gateway project update
My uIoT gateway project has been put on hold lately, I have the PCBs ready for more than a month now, but never had the time to make one and test it. I finally put one together today, but apparently…
pChart-ing emoncms data
pChart is a neat PHP charting tool, I have been using prior to switching to emoncms. Emoncms has multigraphs available, that are much more interactive, but they are slow too. I also have had some issues with certain feeds that…
RFM2Pi firmware updates
With quite a few RFM2Pi boards out there, some issues started to pop up. When using the board to send time packets to emonGLCD, the board would interpret random serial gibberish as valid command and would switch its nodeID to…
New laptop
I got myself Santa brought me a new laptop couple days ago, an Asus K56CM. I am no brand slave, I just pick one that fits the budget I set aside and what covers my basic requirements. I prefer not to spend…
Solar water heating in the winter
I now have my evacuated tube solar water heater disconnected from the house’s plumbing system and in ‘winter mode’ meaning that I am crossing fingers it doesn’t freeze and break the tubes :). It does have electric heater element inside,…
Calculating distance between two GPS coordinates
Now that I have a PHP script that can find out my physical location, I wanted to calculate how far from home I am. Since ‘home’ is a fixed GPS coordinate and my actual position varies, I needed a method…
Funky LED candle
There is probably a million LED candle projects already, so I had to give it a try too :). I used bare Funky PCB and an ATTiny84 – no need for anything else indeed.The Attiny is set to run on…