Lawyer, writer & author, medical education consultant, and enthusiastic self-taught maker.
bathroom scale
If you've decided to make the Tip the Balance Bathroom Scale, you won't find instructions here! (If you insist on making it, you can find the code here.) This post, on the other hand, will tell you how to make a working bathroom scale. List of
weight loss
Yes, you read the title right. No more arduous diets or cutting out snacks. No more exhausting exercises, or battling with feeble willpower. This amazing new device will take pounds (or kilos) off your weight at the literal blink of an eye. How many times have you stepped gingerly onto
breadboard
How many hours in your life have you spent troubleshooting a project? Knowing your I2C from your SPI You've spent ages connecting a bolognese of wires on your breadboard, making sure to distinguish your MISO from your MOSI, your SDA from your SCK, your DIN from your SDA,
ESP8266
LoRa is relatively new in IoT. (Actually, not that new, but it's taking time to percolate into the ecosphere.) For those that don't know, LoRa stands for "Long Range." We all know the problem of putting a great little sensor at the foot of
ESP8266
A few months before Christmas, social media channels start filling with instructions about LEDs for home decoration. Popular software is WLED, a program that describes itself as: A fast and feature-rich implementation of an ESP8266/ESP32 webserver to control NeoPixel (WS2812B, WS2811, SK6812) LEDs or also SPI based chipsets like
raspberry pi pico
Many readers of this blog will know that it's possible to make an oscilloscope/logic analyzer from the Raspberry Pi Pico. Called Scoppy, full details are on github. When I made a Scoppy with two resistors and a small breadboard a few weeks ago, I went looking for
esp32
This post is more of a Public Service Announcement that a real "how to" explanation. A couple of weeks ago I acquired a WeAct 2.13 inch epaper screen from Aliexpress. The price of such screens is falling continually, so they are now within easy reach of almost
IKEA
I usually start my posts by warning readers that I'm an amateur with no background in coding or electronics. I write these blogs because while I'm figuring out how to do things, I'm working at ground level and my descriptions are generally simple enough
esp32
As I've mentioned so many times in my blog posts, I've never studied electronics or engineering. Consequently, I come at my projects entirely as an amateur - which means that when I finally figure out how to do something, I'm able to guide others
ESP8266
Most of us use a phone app to see the temperature outside - which is fine if you don't mind receiving a reading from a sensor located at a meteorological station somewhere nearby. And when we finally do set up our own IoT sensors, to see them, we
node red
One of the first commercial home automation devices I bought was a hot water boiler switch from Switcher. Like most remote devices, it came with its own app. At the time - about 5-6 years ago - it was nigh-on impossible to hack into the protocol to connect to it
Cricket
Update November 2022 - it seems that ThingsonEdge didn't make it and the cricket is no longer available. Their web and social media presence have disappeared from the internet. Anyone with Version 2 can still update its firmware, but Version 1 - which updated from the ThingsonEdge server