I have recently bought a BananaPi with the intent of making a automotive datalogger. I needed a simple power supply that would work reliably in my car. I found some nice looking modules in “The Thick Electronic” store on Aliexpress.
Continue reading “Small, cheap power supply modules from Aliexpress”
This is one of my older projects. I designed it for a friend of mine when he became fed up with his Rot1prog controller going bonkers all the time. I wanted it to be something as simple as possible, but still doing its job, easy to use and easy to service.
Continue reading “Universal antenna rotator controller”
I finally completed work on my networked thermometer. I got some old 7Ah 5-cell NiCd battery packs from emergency lighting fixtures that will power the device. I wonder how long can they last. NiCd batteries suffer from high self-discharge rates, on the other hand the NodeMCU will sleep most of the time and use very little energy.
Continue reading “NodeMCU as a standalone thermometer”
I recently got some discarded NiCd batteries from emergency lighting fixtures (5 cells, 7 Ah) and I started looking for a way to check if they might still work. While searching for chargers I found model B6AC that: charges automatically almost any battery chemistry (various lithium, NiCd, NiMH, lead-acid), can discharge batteries in a controlled way, balance li-ion battery cells, can cycle the battery through several charges and discharges, indicates the charge and discharge capacity (and probably some more features I still do not realize).
Continue reading “B6AC battery charger teardown”
In the last post I made a short introduction on development using the NodeMCU platform with a simple reading of a 1-wire thermometer. This time I will show how to make a basic networked application for the NodeMCU and the server part for a computer to gather some useful data.
The idea is pretty simple: do a temperature conversion, connect to a wireless network, transmit the reading to a server, maybe get back some configuration and start over.
Continue reading “NodeMCU networked thermometer”
NodeMCU is a versatile board with the WiFi-enabled ESP8266 system-on-chip, USB to UART bridge, voltage regulator and some auxiliary components. With a price tag of about $9 on Aliexpress it allows you develop your own Internet “things” literally in minutes. The killer part is a build-in Lua interpreter, so no toolchain or development kit is required. The language is pretty easy. Text files containing Lua scripts are simply uploaded to the board and executed directly by the interpreter inside ESP8266. You can also type the commands directly via the terminal. NodeMCU firmware can also be uploaded to any ESP8266 module like the ESP-01, ESP-07 or bare ESP-12.