Adrian’s Electronics Blog Arduino Projects, Teardowns & Tutorials for Hobbyists

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 […]

2 min 2

General

I’m still here; a pong clock, SLA battery tester & crappy Chinese fakes…

Adrian Smith
12/12/2018

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 […]

2 min 5

General

The useful TL431 chip

Adrian Smith
14/08/2018

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 […]

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 […]

1 min 2

General

British Gas Hive Thermostat no signal issues

Adrian Smith
07/04/2018

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 […]

2 min 4

Arduino 6 input DVM 0 to +50V range

Adrian Smith
01/04/2018

This is a project I built for work as an add on to our battery tester which is able to test up to six batteries at once. The battery tester is controlled by a PLC and does not show voltages in real time so we had no idea how long the battery runtime was remaining. […]

1 min 3

General

Salvaging electronic components from old electronics… Not worth it?

Adrian Smith
08/03/2018

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 […]

1 min 3

What to do with a blown / faulty ATmega328 – Don’t throw it out… It may still be useful.

Adrian Smith
25/02/2018

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 […]

2 min 0

Projects

A simple Arduino gas detector example.

Adrian Smith
24/01/2018

Overview So you may be wondering why I tried this. Well, I wrote some code to check for dangerous gases released when charging lead acid batteries as a safety concern at work. This came about because we charge lots of sealed lead acid batteries which usually charge without any problems but on one occasion one […]

2 min 1

Building an LCD alarm clock & DS1307 RTC accuracy

Adrian Smith
13/01/2018

I’ve been working on a new Arduino project; the ultimate alarm clock which shows the time and date on a 16×2 LCD module and features multiple alarms with repeat / auto arm and radio function. I used a Tiny DS1307 RTC and EEPROM module which is a breadboard / veroboard compatible PCB containing a DS1307 […]

1 min 1

Rants

Atari Portfolio retro computers

Adrian Smith
28/12/2017

Around 12 years ago I had four Atari Portfolio palmtop computers complete with boxes, manuals and a ton of memory cards plus many accessories. For some really stupid reason I decided that they were a pieces of crap and chucked them (I faintly remember trying to sell them on ebay without success) but not before […]

1 min 3

Projects

NIMH battery tester – firmware version 2. Now with improved voltage reading accuracy.

Adrian Smith
17/12/2017

In my last post I built a multiple AA battery tester but it used the 5V as a voltage reference which wasn’t ideal and was giving readings that were good but could be better. I modified the code to use the 1.1V internal reference of the Mega328 MCU to calculate the actual 5V supply voltage […]