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

2 min 0

Arduino NIMH battery tester update

Adrian Smith
12/12/2017

Back in October I posted about a basic NIMH battery tester based on an Arduino nano I made some time back which was a successful project and works quite well however it could only test one battery at a time and didn’t apply a constant current load. It was good but not very accurate and […]

2 min 2

Arduino scrolling clock and custom message on 5×7 matrix

Adrian Smith
06/12/2017

Introduction I’ve been playing around with a red 5×7 dot matrix LED display module which I have had in my spares box for a while. I thought about making some sort of scrolling message display as an Arduino project but could not find any more of these modules online as I’d need at least another […]

1 min 0

General

Fake DS18B20 sensors from China sold on Ebay / Amazon?

Adrian Smith
04/12/2017

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 […]

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Rants

Is it even worth repairing consumer goods nowadays?

admin
02/12/2017

30 years ago… Yes. Now not so much. Take for example a repair of a Panasonic DMR-BWT720 blu-ray recorder which I was handed for free as it had failed and had been replaced with a newer model. The fault – freezes / runs slow and fails to record sometimes. If it does record the image […]

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Projects

Sanyo 1970’s LED clock / radio resurrection (well sort of)

admin
21/11/2017

In the quest to make something useful out of a load of old junk I’ve found in my cupboards I came across my old clock radio I’ve had since 1978 a while back and decided to do something with it rather than throw it out. It actually worked but it had an ‘accident’ with the […]

1 min 0

General

Ebay transistor tester testing

admin
19/11/2017

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 […]

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Microcontrollers

Playing with an 8051 microcontroller

admin
13/11/2017

I’ve been using the Arduino for a while now and made a few projects but at work we use the 8051 as the primary micro for our in house equipment. Yeah it’s outdated but Silicon Labs have taken the original 8051 design and vastly improved it with clock speeds of 100Mhz. It can easily outperform […]

1 min 0

A WIFI spectrum analyzer and Talk-Talk routers suck A$$

admin
03/11/2017

A close relative of mine has been having lots of wifi connection issues over the last few months but just on a couple of devices. A scan of the wifi neighborhood showed only a couple of signals from adjacent houses which were too weak to cause a problem. I tried changing the channels, 150 or […]

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First useful Arduino project – NIMH battery tester

admin
25/10/2017

***Updated*** now version 5 which has a vastly improved display layout and better voltage reading accuracy. Download can be found towards the bottom of this page. During my clearout of old junk I came across an LCD display fitted into a small plastic case with a PC parallel cable attached which was originally used for […]

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Projects

Clear-out day – and PSU refurb

admin
24/10/2017

A few weeks ago i decided it was time I got rid of some old shite I’ve been keeping for years. I also decided to make this blog and some of my early electronics projects I have featured on this site. Not that they are any use to me nowadays but I want to keep […]