Making Stuff Blog

Wiring up Wilf Rigter's SIMD1 V3 4 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 4 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 4 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…

Serial ports and making things 16 years ago
I'm plotting out some projects and the things that need to be done in order to make them work. And I realized that there's some very simple starting point steps to wiring and managing things necessary to make things building-block style. So, the fundamentals: Data can flow in a few ways. You can…

I am still scared of non-through-hole parts 16 years ago
A few notes on component selection for hacking