A blog of my electronics and microcontroller projects
General stuff
Well time certainly seems to fly and it’s the end of another year. It’s been a year since I finished my LED animated Pong clock which I initially started about 3 years ago and I’ve been working on an improved version using bi colour LED matrix modules I obtained from a scrap advertising LED board.…
I mentioned before I was going to make a 12 volt lead acid battery tester at one point. I’ve repurposed the single AA tester I had made back in 2017 and converted it to test higher voltage batteries. Without repeating myself from earlier posts I have just decided to keep this short and just put…
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…
I’ve had to turn off user registration due to too many spammers registering. As the anti spam system only checks when a user actually posts a comment this leaves loads of spammers that register but are unable to post. I have to manually check and remove them. Anyone can comment without registering though so if…
Just a quick update; I’ve got a couple of electronics projects on the go which should be finished after Christmas. One is a personal project which is a modified version of an animated clock using two 24×16 modules from sure electronics. That displays some pong animations amongst other stuff. It’s still a WIP but I…
I haven’t made any electronics projects for a while now but I was working on some circuits at work that used a TL431 shunt regulator. This chip can be used to provide a 2.5V voltage reference and also 5V with the addition of two 10K resistors between the Ref pin and supply voltage and another…
I recently replaced my home heating controls with the Hive system from British Gas as my old system had developed a fault with the receiver not switching on the boiler intermittently due to a faulty relay contact. The Hive system worked great for about 3 months until the other day when I noticed it was…
I’ve seen a few websites where other electronics hobbyists talk about where they get their parts from and many do what I did about 25 years ago; salvage components from scrap electronics by desoldering them. I must admit it’s something I do from time to time; when I throw out old electronics I see if…
In one of my past arduino projects I accidentally damaged a Arduino Mega328 MCU (or it may have been faulty to begin with) but I decided to keep hold of it in case I needed it for a very basic project that didn’t need many ports. The chip’s pins all functioned OK but it had…
A while ago I read an article on fake electronic components that are flooding the market with high end audio and hobbyist parts being the biggest targets of the fakers. The article in particular spoke about high end transistors used in power amplifiers blowing or producing nowhere near the gain and / or frequency response…
I bought myself one of those cheap transistor testers off ebay based on the Ardutester at https://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=164112.0 which basically is an Arduino project that someone made which the Chinese commercialized and ripped off. It’s actually a great bit of kit but it’s clearly based on an Arduino project that was never intended to be a…