One side effect of ordering PCBs from a professional fab house is that you always get more PCBs than you actually need. For example, when you place an order for a PCB prototype at PCBWay, you get at least 10 copies of the PCB, sometimes even more. In most cases, …
(This article is updated regularly as I create new development boards. The new ones are towards the bottom of this page.) Over the years I have created several development boards and breakout boards. Despite their cost (time, effort, money) they are invaluable investments for development. They simplify and speed up …
Introduction Recently, I finished my first, usable IoT prototype on a breadboard. It is a simple unit, consisting of an LED (emulating a digital output) and a switch (emulating a digital input). Many of the IoT applications can be traced back to this simple application, so even if a particular …
Introduction The latest “craze” among embedded electronics engineers is the tiny chip called ESP8266. It’s a low cost, low power, high performance chip allowing wireless connectivity with your wifi network. In the following I would like to share my experiences setting up such a module for the first time. The …
Introduction For some time I have been planning to build a number of devices that make use of stepper motors. Since I have no experience in using stepper motors I had no idea what parts, what driver and controller circuits I would need to get them running. After extensive research …
Introduction I have seen many interesting modifications of (mostly) game controllers on the internet. They all have one thing common: they were specific to the controller in question. I wanted to design something that could be attached to any controller, regardless if it uses positive logic (button pressed = logic …
Introduction I have a few projects in mind for the near future which all have one thing in common – they all require remote controls to be operated. So I decided to experiment with remote controls a bit. A small selection of my huge pile of never or a very long …
Introduction Definition (from Wikipedia): A rotary encoder, is an electro-mechanical device that converts the angular position of a shaft or axle to an analog or digital code. I have been playing with a device like this for some time and thought I’d share what I learnt. I am not going …
Introduction I found a small project at another site about fading an LED in and out smoothly, without a microcontroller. I changed it a bit. In my version I removed one of the transistors and changed some resistor values. This is supposed to result in lower costs and smaller footprint. …
