Cari is away in Miami for the weekend and I have a bunch of little household projects I want to complete. Out in the yard, I need to replace the old garden hoses and sprayers, pull some weeds, apply lawn fertilizer, and trim the palm tree and Bird of Paradise in the front yard. In the garage, I have a few tool holders to hang and need to recycle some old rotors and a car battery. Inside there are some pieces of iron artwork I need to hang, as well as some normal chores such as laundry. And, if I can get all of those things done, I have some work to do on the DeLorean and some more organization to do in the office. I recently saw a YouTube video from Norman Chan of Tested.com reviewing the TinyTV from TinyCircuits. Instantly, I needed (and ordered) one. It arrived a...
Category: Electronics
A New Year
I feel lucky that all of the craziness that began in 2020 has barely affected me and Cari. What's missed the most is hanging out with friends, both near and far, and not being with them during the holidays. Other than that, every once in a while I get the craving to go out to a restaurant. We have not eaten out since the pandemic started, and that's not really an issue with online ordering as it is these days. I'm also not blinded by the fact that an arbitrary number on a piece of paper now says it's a different year and things will be different. Sure, I'm hopeful that maybe things will be much more normal by the end of 2021, but I fear that the narrow-mindedness of people who think that everything bad died with the turn of the calendar will once again push us into a...
New Equipment, Continued Building
As I was building out some electronics over the past few days, I realized that my setup was lacking, so I ordered some new tools. I started off getting a Hakko FA-400 fume extractor to remove the solder smoke. For some reason I've never had an extractor, and I decided this week I needed one. I researched the cost and time it would take to 3D print and build my own, and the effort just wasn't worth it to me. Next up is the Kaisi Silicone Repair Mat. These things are great as it prevents parts from rolling off the workbench onto the floor and from getting mixed together with its built-in trays. Also, since it's silicone, the parts that you place on it don't slide around a lot. Lastly is a two-piece system. I saw a great review on the QuadHands Workbench Mount over at The Makers Workbench YouTube...
Switcheroo
I fixed the vertical blind in the living room, but I forgot that the lawn service usually comes on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, so I've postponed applying the fertilizer until after they've come. Instead, I spent some time cleaning up my desk and organizing. I still have a stack of magazines to go through, so I'm going to go take a shower and then spend the rest of the day reading. Since this is vacation day 4 of 10, I feel I need to be somewhat productive in a relaxing way. I've also gone through HackerBox #57, "Safe Mode", I may start working on that too today or tomorrow. The contents of HackerBox 57 "Safe Mode".
Buildup to PCB
Now that the Weather Station ISD prototype is breadboarded and working, I've decided to start designing v1.0 of the printed circuit board. The Fritzing drawing, and schematic are complete. These will be used as reference for transferring into Eagle. Weather Station ISD Fritzing drawing.Weather Station ISD Fritzing schematic.Weather Station ISD Fritzing part design (Illustrator). All new work was added to the internal GitLab server with commit SHA fad61e9e.
Weather Station ISD
Last year I picked up an electronics kit for building a miniature weather station. I finally built a prototype of it tonight on a breadboard. It's fully functional and I believe I can consider the codebase release v1.0. OLED display showing current date and time.OLED display showing current weather.OLED display showing 3-day weather forecast.ESP8266-12E module.l. to r., DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor, BMP180 pressure sensor, and BH1750FVI light sensor. The next step will be to design a custom PCB for this, which I've never done before. Should be an interesting challenge.
Making and Catching Up
Yesterday I spent three hours cleaning up and organizing in the garage. A lot of the worked centered around putting away all of the spare aquarium supplies and equipment back into their proper places on the shelves. Then, I took the time to finally break down a ton of cardboard boxes and put them into the recycling bin in preparation for next Monday. Because of COVID challenges, Hillsborough county has moved our recycling pickup to every other week for now. That means all cans and plastic containers need to be smashed down flat and all cardboard needs to be cut up to smaller pieces so we get efficient, compact usage of the bin. Anyway, I also put away and re-organized several tools and finally did a big cleanup of the workbench area. One of the little organization things I've been wanting to do is to get my drill bits into...
Bucket o’ Updates
I really need to get back on board with blogging. It's been so long... I've re-enabled my subscription to HakerBoxes. So far, I've received boxes 54 (Smart Home), 55 (High Roller), and 56 (Demon Seed). I've created some project pages on my internal wiki, but have made no progress toward assembling the kits. I have a large box of unpainted D&D minis sitting here next to me that were originally intended for a campaign I created for a bunch of friends. Of course, this was all before the COVID-19 craziness. We haven't played yet, but I do want to start chipping away at painting all of these. Eventually we will use them. About a month ago my main PC crapped out. I decided to do something I've never done before; spec out a high-end machine and order all new parts. I did such, and got all of the components from...
Lots of Digging
It's been quite a while since I've posted up here. I've created a reminder on my phone to post at least once per week, so we'll see if that helps me or not. Over the past two weeks, I've finally gotten on the Minecraft bandwagon. Yeah, I know it's late, but I tried playing the game about 10 years ago, and for some reason I wasn't interested. But, I revisited it and have to say that it's really been a great mental relaxation game. Nothing too heavy. Simple. It's been fun playing on a server with a couple of friends, which helps too. I'm still working on the lighting project for the kitchen cabinets. I'm really hoping to be done with the entire project by the end of September. Decided to use a Raspberry Pi and a microcontroller, which is new for me. It's taking more time than expected, but...
Site Tweak, Beginning the Weekend
Since the site's back up, I decided to head over to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to force a snapshot of this site. After doing so, I thought to myself "I wonder if there's an automated way to do this?". And, there is. I've installed a plugin that will submit a new snapshot each time the site is updated. Publishing this post will be the first test. There are several projects lined up this weekend: UPS Battery: I ordered a new replacement battery for the UPS on my workstation, since the battery in there is pretty much dead. Gotta go pick it up from the store tomorrow. Patio Set: Heading to the store to get a new patio set for the house. Ceiling fans: I ordered three ceiling fans; one for the office and one each for the upstairs bedrooms. Tomorrow they get installed. Loft Furniture: We got two couched for the...
