ESP8266 Frosty 2.0 Frosty the front-yard Christmas decoration has been upgraded from 1980's fiber-optic technology ( which was admittedly, very high-tech at the time ), to what the new millennium has provided: bright-ass LEDs. Here is Frosty in his original condition. That broom seems to get broken even before you take it out
garden Hydroponic Cucumbers - the saga continues I'm well into HydroCucs 2024, so this is going to be somewhat of a slideshow and a summary of a lot of things that went wrong. My wife really likes cucumbers but I've never succeeded in growing them in the garden. Somewhere I heard that it
3D printing Improved Balancing Robot Yes, there was an original balancing robot. I was curious about PID controllers. I lifted some generic balancing robot code for an Arduino and with a little adaptation and some cheap components I was able to build and tune something that would balance. It was adorable but had a lot
electronics PRL: Integrated Test Fire #1 The hardware and software have come together, off the bench, for the first time! Initial tests of the launcher were fully-manual, and then later tested with a 12V battery use to power opening the valve. This test was the culmination of a lot of other things coming together and proved
ESP8266 PRL: Circuit Design As part of the Pneumatic Rocket Launcher project I needed to design a small circuit that would trigger the sprinkler solenoid which opens the valve for a launch. This solenoid is labeled as 24V ( and apparently that rating is for an AC voltage ) but my internet research and careless experimenting
ESP8266 Getting SPIFFS Using the ESP8266 to host a micro-application is one of it's most appealing uses. In addition to the EEPROM ( electrically erasable programmable read-only memory ) where a very limited amount of data can be stored, there is another special allocation for "actual files" called SPIFFS ( I won&
ESP8266 Getting Started with the ESP8266-01 This is so far the smallest wifi-connected thing I've programmed. Looking back more than 2 years now, this post will document my 'first contact' with the ESP family of hardware. I have since come a long way, but these first few encounters were what got me
ESP8266 IoT Weather Station: Part I Building a wifi-enabled weather station with a DHT11 temperature sensor has turned into a great learning experience about power consumption and battery powering IoT devices.
