Archive for category: Embedded

Musing about a 2 dimensional delta robot…

February 2, 2017 | electronics, Embedded, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering

First of all, if anyone is still swinging by this blog, yes, I’m still alive. While I haven’t exactly been prolific in my leisure activities, they haven’t stopped entirely. I worked on some simple embedded development for the hackaday.io 1K code challenge, which you can see on my hackaday.io page, and which hopefully I’ll write […]

Ordered some ESP8266 boards in an Arduino form factor…

August 20, 2016 | Arduino, Embedded, ESP8266, Hardware | By: Mark VandeWettering

The ESP8266 is an amazing little processor: cheap and capable and (most interestingly) WiFi enabled. I have some of the older “nodemcu” boards that I got for about $7 each, but there are newer alternatives that include up to 4M of flash memory, and a variety of interesting form factors. I noticed that WeMos was […]

Two bits of hardware on order…

December 19, 2015 | Embedded, Hacking, Internet of Things, Raspberry Pi, Small Linux Computers | By: Mark VandeWettering

Yes, my fascination with cheap computing devices continues. I’ve got two bits on order at the moment. First is the Pine A64 from Kickstarter. This one won’t be showing up for a while, but seems to be a pretty nice piece of kit. You can think of it as a competitor for the Raspberry Pi, […]

The ESP8266…

July 28, 2015 | Embedded, ESP8266, LED | By: Mark VandeWettering

I’ve been quiet lately, but mostly because what tinkering I’ve been doing has been relatively limited in scope. But one thing I have begun to play with a lot are various tiny development boards based upon the Espressif ESP8266 WiFi chip. I’ve mentioned them a bit before, but I’ve made some progress since then (and […]

Beginning to look at MQTT…

April 6, 2015 | Embedded, Internet of Things, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering

My weekend experiments lead me eventually toward flashing nodemcu, a Lua based firmware that runs on the ESP8266. Having a simple programming language (albeit one I’m not super fluent in) is very cool, and enables a whole bunch of nifty experiments. While reading up, I encountered the acronym MQTT again. From Wikipedia: MQTT (formerly Message […]

The “official” ESP8266 Wiki…

April 4, 2015 | Development Boards, Embedded, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering

This morning I’m still drinking coffee and waking up, but I was pointed at “the ESP8266 wiki”, which appears to be this Wiki page. Bookmarked mostly so I can quickly find it again. But it has some good information. If I haven’t teased you enough with this experimentation, consider these features of the ESP8266: It’s […]

Not all is easy-peasy with the ESP8266, with a short addendum

April 3, 2015 | Arduino, Development Boards, Embedded | By: Mark VandeWettering

Okay, after I did my quick video record yesterday re: the ESP8266, I continued to play with it a bit more. And, it must be said, I had a little bit of difficulty which I thought I would write up so that other people who are experiencing the same issues might be able to comment, […]

First electrons for the ESP8266…

April 2, 2015 | Arduino, Development Boards, Embedded, Internet of Things, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering

In the telescope making world, we call the first time that a telescope is used to look at the sky “first light”. I’ve decided to call the first time I load some code onto a new development board “first electrons”. A few weeks ago, when I did a video that illustrated some of the bucket […]

Tiny Implementation of Conway’s Life…

March 22, 2015 | Arduino, Embedded, My Projects, My Stories | By: Mark VandeWettering

I had a few minutes, so I thought I’d try making a graphics demo that runs on the tiny little 0.96″ OLED display I mentioned last week. One of the first programs I ever wrote was an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life, having learned about it from Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column in Scientific […]

Discovered a new tool for embedded development: platformio

March 22, 2015 | Embedded, Microcontrollers, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering

I’m pretty old school when it comes to development. To me, writing code is something I like to do with vi (the editor that I learned three decades ago) and compile with Makefiles, especially for code that I do myself. In general, I prefer to do my development on either Linux or Mac OS too, […]