General – Adrian’s electronics blog

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General

Using AI to generate complex Arduino sketches – Grok, Copilot and ChatGPT tested.

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08/08/2025

I recently made a video about using Grok AI to generate me a simple kitchen timer using an Arduino and a 4 digit 7 segment display. After about an hour Grok was successful but using any kind of AI you need to give an accurate prompt describing your hardware, what pins are used and what […]

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General

MDL-150 Electronic load and battery tester review

admin
22/04/2025

The MDL-150 battery capacity tester and DC electronic load A great inexpensive unit that performs as expected and is really good value for money. User interface could use some improvement but otherwise I highly recommend it for hobbyists for occasional use. Oh yeah, throw away the dangerous power supply that comes with it and use […]

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General

SPI driver board for large 2-8″ 7 segment displays

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02/02/2025

As part of a collaboration project through contact with a member of Instructables who had seem my large LED clock project I made some serial driver boards for his project adapted from mine which uses 4″ high LED displays and uses the decimal points as the colons with alternate digits inverted. These driver boards are […]

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General

Teardown of Royal Air Force (UK) ATC control console panels

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25/01/2025

A while back I got part of a communication console unit that was ex military. Not being able to find anything on it at the time I later found out it was part of the desk consoles used for Air Traffic Control for the RAF. I later bought two more units that were slightly different […]

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General

Connecting vintage incandescent (filament) displays to a microcontroller

admin
03/02/2024

I’d thought I’d share these cool retro 7 segment displays I obtained from an old aircraft radio. They are Wamco KW-104S direct view incandescent filament displays which are compatible with LED display driver code – just treat them like common anode 7 segment LED displays. Easy! You just have to bear in mind that they […]

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General

Multiplexing 7 segment displays with a shift register and transistors

admin
19/11/2023

In this example I will show you how to multiplex a 7 segment LED display from a microcontroller such as an Arduino without placing too much load on the microcontroller pins as I have seen in some other examples. Quite a few tutorials I’ve seen are not really good practice for electronics design – some […]

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General

A digital scale controller for HX711 modules up to 99.999Kg

admin
11/11/2023

I was experimenting with load cells for a commercial project and thought I’d share one of the prototypes I built to test HX711 load cell modules. It’s built on Veroboard but I designed a PCB for it however never got it manufactured as you can buy one on AliExpress for around 3 Euros or a […]

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Buying cheap components from Chinese suppliers – win this time!

admin
22/10/2023

I have a couple of electronics projects in the works which use large LED displays and as they have a forward voltage of 8.4V and 20mA current they cannot be driven directly from a microcontroller using multiplexing. I could use a bunch of driver transistors or MOSFETS but that needs 14 pins on the microcontroller […]

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General

Made another YouTube stats display / NTP clock thing…

admin
15/10/2023

Just a quick one today – I obtained a lot of orange 0.4″ retro LED modules so I thought seem as I have a few blank PCB’s left over from my previous YouTube counter display I thought I’d make another. This one was for test purposes to see what else I could use a 4 […]

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General

How to determine the pinout of an unknown 7 segment display

admin
18/06/2023

If you have an unknown 7 segment LED display and you want to use it in your project, you need to determine its pinout. The pinout is the arrangement of pins that connect the display to the power supply and the controller. There are different types of 7 segment displays, such as common anode, common […]

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General

Call centre calls waiting and LED matrix display teardowns

admin
09/06/2023

I recently acquired a few scrap Seltek (now Avaya) wallboards from an insurance company’s call centre, and they turned out to be quite intriguing. Among the items were three call waiting monitors and a SDX ACD scrolling message display, also known as a “wallboard.” What caught my attention were the separate LED modules in the […]

3 min 1

General

Re-using a microcontroller from a LCDmodkit USB204B.V02 board

admin
13/05/2023

On one of my very old computers I had one of those LCDmodkit PC status screens that consisted of a 20×4 LCD housed in a 5.25″ bay and was interfaced to an internal USB header on the motherboard via a USB2LCD controller. As there are no Microsoft certified drivers available for this device it was […]