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Setting up a new HP networked printer (say, a Color LaserJet Pro M255dw or M283fdw) without getting HP crapware all over the place in 13 minutes
I hate everything about printers. I especially hate the modern printer with bloatware, crapware, spyware, and who knows what else that they are going to push on you. So, since it became apparent that I ought to get a new printer lately, I ended up trying to get a printer going without any of the…

Driving intelligent LEDs from a microcontroller: Level shifting, isolation, and more... 1 month ago
Ideally, you want to use 5v logic level to communicate with NeoPixels and other intelligent LEDs . This is actually... well, mostly reasonable. Part of why 5v still gets used is because it's relatively fault tolerant and easy to work with. Lower voltages are going to be more susceptible to noise…

An introduction to power supplies and managing different voltages 1 month ago
LED projects inevitably involve dealing with a few different voltages. The electronics way to talk about this is to just say that voltage is about potential energy. There's a lot more potential energy at higher voltages, as if you've got a high-pressure pipe or you are on the top of the hill…

The fundamentals of driving a plain LED 2 months ago
To successfully drive an LED, you need to arrange for a controlled amount of current to flow through the LED and switch it off if necessary. Sometimes most of the work is done for you. For example, you can really easily find non-intelligent LED strips that are packaged such that "all" you need to…

A brief tour of intelligent LEDs 2 months ago
I'm not really sure what the history of these is. At some point, I started seeing people using RGB LED stuff and suddenly everybody was screwing with them. Hackaday indicates that the WS2812 dates back to the second half of 2013 or so with the APA102 showing up on the scene a year later . Either…