brainwagon

I was hoping to be a little further on writing up and making video of my solar energy project, but a blown power steering pup in my Expedition left me stranded for a couple of hours on Tuesday night, and I’m still scrambling to get some of my intermediate goals up to date. But I […]

Yes, it’s me, back after a far too long hiatus. Sometimes life intervenes, and you just have to reset your priorities. But rest assured, the geeky stuff that I used to work on and chronicle in my blog continues, and on this long Labor Day weekend, I thought I might mention a project I’ve been […]

Over the last year I’ve spent a small amount of money and a larger amount of time accumulating a bunch of development modules from banggood. This began mostly with me getting some spare Arduino modules cheaply. Whereas an official Arduino might cost you $25 or so from Adafruit or Sparkfun, you can get a Geekcreit […]

This post is the kind of round about post you get first thing in the morning.   I’ll get to the title question at the end. This morning, I was interested in doing a tiny bit of tinkering. I had found one of these 4 digit 7 segment LED displays while digging around for something […]

A few years ago, I got seriously interested in amateur radio and satellites. I would often haul out a small Yagi antenna and my trusty Kenwood TH-D7A and try to talk to other hams by bouncing signals off the various satellites which acted as amateur radio repeaters. During that time, I wrote a Python version […]

I didn’t have a ton of time to tinker when I got home, but I did play a tiny bit more with the WeMos D1 R2. I got it mounted on an old breadboard that I had previously used for Arduino experiments, and then tried reflashing it with new, fresh NodeMCU firmware that I built […]

I just got a trio of WeMos D1 R2 boards from Banggood this morning. I haven’t had a chance to do anything with them yet, other than power one of them on and check it for basic function, but I thought I’d give a brief review. For those of you who maybe haven’t been tracking […]

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 […]

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 […]

Greetings readers. I’m hopefully wishing there is still more than one. This weekend was the Bay Area Maker Faire 2015, the 10th incarnation of an event which has become increasingly (even frighteningly) popular. I’m tempted to channel Yogi Berra, who said “Nobody goes there. It’s way too crowded.” Anyway, I got out of my house […]

Yesterday, I mentioned the idea of using the cheap ESP8266 as a clock source for a WSPR beacon transmitter. My initial idea was to basically write code for the Arduino that connected to a remote NTP server, formulate UDP packages… sounds like a pain. But then I found that there was alternative software I could […]