Microcontrollers – Adrian’s electronics blog

3 min 3

ESP8266 based NTP clock with YouTube statistics display

admin
08/03/2021

I made some internet connected 8 digit 7 segment LED displays using a NodeMCU and Harris semiconductor ICM7228A LED driver ICs the latter of which were salvaged from old aircraft avionics. As the chips would unlikely sell on eBay I decided to make them into a project and improve upon my earlier YouTube counter project […]

2 min 0

The DM134B 16 bit shift register with constant current LED drivers

admin
06/02/2021

I have quite a few DM134B IC’s which are 16 bit shift registers complete with constant current LED drivers built in so I decided to make something useful from them. The chips require minimal components; LED current is simply set via an external resistor which is far better than having to use 16 individual resistors. […]

2 min 12

Using Arduino to control display module salvaged from LED sign.

Adrian Smith
31/05/2020

I came across someone selling parts from a large LED sign on ebay which by doing some research came from a Data Display LED board originally used for movie name, showtimes and price information display in a cinema lobby. Their part number could be DL110 as that’s the only number I can find on the […]

2 min 0

Microcontrollers

ATmega328 eeprom damaged by power surge?

Adrian Smith
25/04/2020

I had a power surge the other day followed by power cuts that lasted around a second and another about 5 seconds later. Everything seemed OK in the house and even the oven clock was still working and that always reset during a brownout. However my garden watering timer was showing garbage on the LCD […]

1 min 10

Animated clock using 16×32 bi colour LED matrix modules

Adrian Smith
08/04/2020

I finally got round to finishing the improved version of my earlier pong clock which used two single colour 16×24 led modules with a built in controller. This version can display 3 colours and has several different modes to the earlier version and also it can display scrolling graphics from the popular retro game, pac-man. […]

2 min 0

Multiplexing seven segment displays on an Arduino

Adrian Smith
03/11/2019

I’ve made a few projects that use 7 segment displays with methods involving both using a chain of shift registers and multiplexing using the sevenseg library. In my most recent project I’d used 4x shift registers to drive 4 displays which worked well but was a pain to connect up and needlessly complicated. I have […]

1 min 0

A high capacity lithium battery tester with printout

Adrian Smith
20/09/2019

I mentioned a while ago I had made a version of my single AA cell tester which can test high capacity LiFePO4 batteries with a nominal voltage of 24 volts (8 cells) which I had made for work as we supply 30 and 60 amp hour batteries which need to be tested. I have finally […]

2 min 1

Arduino pump timer with GLCD

Adrian Smith
31/07/2019

I’ve been making a timer for my garden watering system as I have bought a few cheap timers from Amazon / Ebay in the past but they were either rubbish or went faulty within a year so I decided to make my own. I used a 240×64 graphic LCD salvaged from an old & obsolete […]

2 min 1

Further update on battery testers

Adrian Smith
27/03/2019

If you have been reading my blog you will have noticed I made two Arduino based NIMH AA battery testers around 2 years ago. One was the first Arduino project I made but it needed some improvement and as I had mentioned in one of my previous posts I’m really running out of things to […]

1 min 0

Gas and smoke detector update

Adrian Smith
05/01/2019

A while ago I made a rather silly project as I had a spare MQ2 sensor laying round left over from a previous experiment. I decided to build a circuit that simply displays the analog value from the sensor on a 7 segment display. It was a bit pointless but it did detect gas, farts […]

2 min 4

A large animated LED matrix clock with various time display modes

Adrian Smith
29/12/2018

Just over 2 years ago I bought an Arduino Uno development board and began to see what I could do with it. I looked online for inspiration and came across this pong clock by Nick’s LED projects. I immediately thought now that’s cool and wanted to make one for myself and set about trying to […]

1 min 0

H2S gas detector for battery charging with auto charger cut off

Adrian Smith
22/05/2018

I posted back in January about a project I had in mind for our battery charging area at work to automatically turn off the power to the battery chargers if dangerous levels of toxic Hydrogen Sulphide were detected. The project was cancelled but resurrected about 3 months later when another battery failed releasing gas and […]