Lawyer, writer & author, medical education consultant, and enthusiastic self-taught maker.
node red
Like most makers, my home is automated - not with off-the-shelf IoT devices, but with home-built switches and relays, Raspberry Pis and ESPs. My first remote switches - all controlled through ESP8266 01s- were mostly built with Blynk. I'd contentedly call up the app on my phone and
raspberry pi
This post was prompted by an exchange I saw on a RasPi Facebook group a couple of weeks ago. It started when someone asked how many Raspberry Pis members had. Scores of people responded, and it became clear that many of us have lots. One guy claimed to have 300!
ESP8266
My last post was about the Cricket ESP8266 board, a tiny device that lets you run an ESP8266 for months on a single AA battery. In my Facebook post about that article, one of the commenters was Guy Sheffer who writes the Guysoft blog. I'd heard of Guy
ESP8266
A chance encounter on a Facebook group brought me - literally - to the Edge. I read a post in which someone mentioned the ThingsonEdge "Cricket" board. A plethora of hostile comments followed. Everyone said it was too expensive, wasn't sufficiently capable, or superfluous in today&
IOT
A couple of months ago I posted a project to build a router-restarter with an simple ESP8266 and a relay. The post proved to be very popular - but many people disapproved of the technique. Most of the project critics live in advanced countries with sophisticated internet infrastructure and they
DS3231 Real Time Clock
Generally at whatimade.today we post original projects we dream up ourselves. Today's post is a little different. We're going to describe how we constructed Mirko Pavleski's single-digit clock. We made it because it's a fun project, wonderfully impressive to look at,
router
The weakest link of our digital lives at home is the pipe into our house and the device it's attached to. Our cable-modem allows our equipment to communicate with the outside world. Like all computers, modems are prone to crashing; some of us need to restart at least
Arduino
A few months ago I documented the process for creating a large 7-segment LED display. After figuring out the pin locations, the wiring, and the code, I attached an Arduino Nano to a daughter board to create a beautiful self-contained 4-digit display. ###Adding a Real-Time Clock (RTC) When co-blogger, Allan,
MAX7219
This is a continuation of the post I wrote more than two years ago where I explored the pin layout of a large LED dot matrix display. As you can see from the photo below, I eventually made it into a clock/thermometer. The problem was, it had lots of
ESP8266
As always, before I begin my description, I'd like to give credit to the original creators of this project. It's called Ka-Radio and there's an instructable here, Hackaday here, and GitHub here. The Instructable/Hackaday try their best to explain how to make the
Arduino
This is the hardware part of my odyssey to design and build a large 4-digit, 7-segment display, running on an Arduino Nano. It's a great case-study in figuring out something complicated - by taking small steps, one at a time. I'm an enthusiastic amateur with no
Arduino
This post explains how I ended up manufacturing a cute little binary counter PCB through jlcpcb.com. To make it clear from the start - my only connection with the company is that I've ordered a couple of PCBs from them. I'm simply amazed that they