As part of a project to make DIY water activated diving flashing marker, I needed a simple circuit to detect when the marker is in contact with water. Turns all all it takes to do that is a a couple of basic components. Here is the diagram; P1 and P2 are the probes that will… Read More »
I was looking for an option to create a circuit with a switch, so I can use two single cell li-on Nokia cell phone batteries in series, but charge them in parallel through a USB charger. The idea is to be able to install the batteries in a small robot, where they will not be… Read More »
After testing the basic Wi-Fi connectivity options of the ESP8266 it is now time to explore some of the more interesting features of the chip. In the sketch below the NodeMCU development board creates a Wi-Fi access point and starts a web-server. A HTML page hosted on the web-server displays analog data from a photocell and allows you to control… Read More »
In the following examples, I will be using the NodeMCU development board and will program it with the Arduino software. Hopefully you have already set-up your ESP8266 development environment and were able to load the blink sketch. If not please follow this tutorial first. ESP8266 WiFi station mode example The ESP8266 can communicate over WiFi in two… Read More »
Part 1 of this tutorial covers the set-up of the Arduino IDE to support the ESP8266 boards. In part 2 I will go through the steps of loading a slightly modified Blink sketch to the NodeMCU board. First, a couple of things to be aware of when working with the ESP8266 boards: Power: ESP8266 is… Read More »
I have recently started exploring an ESP8266 based development board I had sitting around. There is a growing number of firmware and development tools for the board, but as I am familiar with the Arduino IDE and syntax, I decided to give it a shot first. If you are familiar with Lua, you might be… Read More »
ESP8266 Introduction The ESP8266 is a low cost MCU with built in Wi-Fi. It can be paired with another host microcontroller, like an Arduino, to provide WiFi networking capability for a basic IoT development platform. Additionally, the ESP8266 can be used as a stand-alone MCU, as it includes a 32-bit 80Mhz processor, 16 GPIO pins (4 PWM enabled)… Read More »
After a lot of reading and drooling over various 3d printers, I finally pulled the trigger and got myself one: the Monoprice Select Mini 3D. This is a budget printer and the design was focused on low price, versus performance and speed. I am not interested in producing large, very artistic, or decorative prints, so this is… Read More »