Making Stuff Blog

A vaguely finished ESPHome node for my geekroom 3 years ago
Some five months ago , I wrote about how I got started with ESPHome with an ESP8266 and a temperature/humidity sensor on a breadboard. I figured that I'd build it over time. I'd realize that there would be something that would be really nice to add, and so I'd find some parts to do it, or try out…

Making an ATMega32U4 Arduino clone board from scratch 3 years ago
So far, the Ardunio environment seems to be the easiest way for me to get real and practical things done with hardware, most of which has to do with there being a decent open-source library for most of the things that I could write but don't want to. I've never actually purchased a real Arduino…

The missing bits for how to make a QMK macro pad from scratch: Writing a firmware for a custom board 3 years ago
At some point, I was linked to Ruiqi Mao's guide on how to make a keyboard PCB in KiCad and kinda filed in the back of my head the idea of doing that. Because, honestly, PCB design is kinda fun. Eventually, I decided there were enough interesting reasons all coupled to making a ATMega32u4 board…

MD3 v3 fully-analog solar thingie 3 years ago
One of the tenets of the whole BEAM robotics thing was that folks should be making their creations out of easily accessible electronic parts of the sort you could scavenge out of dead electronics or find in Radio Shack. In the time since then, Radio Shack disappeared and it's much harder to…

DigiKey's KiCad library is really broken 3 years ago
tl;dr: Don't use DigiKey's KiCad library. Obviously, you shouldn't trust random libraries on the Internet. Heck, you shouldn't trust the actual KiCad libraries most of the time. I'm still annoyed about this because I've got a pack of useless PCBs. DigiKey, for whatever reasons, has been trying to…

TLC5940, TLC59116, and IS31FL3218 LED drivers 3 years ago
tl;dr: The TLC59116 is a pretty neat part Following up to the previous entry on the CAT4019/CAV4019 LED driver , I got three more intelligent controllers to play with. All three of these are external intelligent LED drivers, two from TI, one from Lumissil. I soldered the three of them to surface…

Three and a half new ways to deep sleep in ESPHome 3 years ago
I've been wanting to do some stuff with solar power and low energy and ESPHome. Thing is, either of those devices eats up quite a bit of current. Less than a Pi, but still enough power to matter if you are using solar power. Furthermore, I think that ESPHome's over-the-air software update system…

Wiring up Wilf Rigter's SIMD1 V3 3 years ago
tl;dr: A FQP30N06L will work as the MOSFET in a SIMD1 V3 circuit, although it's not a very bright solar engine with the parts I've used. In the 1990's, Mark Tilden cooked up the idea of BEAM robotics. Instead of using complicated digital electronics, he'd wire up simple biologically-inspired analog…

ESPHome is pretty neat 3 years ago
ESP8266 and ESP32 modules are pretty neat. They are a nice combination of cheap, featurefull, and usable and, ever since a Hackaday post in 2014 , somehow gained a hacker community that enables a lot of really fun things. Also, apparently if you peel apart your WiFi-enabled IoT devices, you…

CAT4109/CAV4109 LED drivers 3 years ago
tl;dr: This is a constant-current driver for 3 strands of LEDS, up to 175 mA per LED, 200 mA total, with the LEDs powered by up to 25 V, with each strand having individual control lines. Available in a SOIC-16 package. I'm always looking for LED drivers and other such circuitry. This part (one is…