Posts

A guide to getting started in hobby electronics in 2018. Motivation For some time now I’ve been thinking about how they should get started in electronics. It is easy to point them to Arduino and say, start there, and that is what many guides do. But beyond blinking an LED, it is sometimes hard to suss out what to do next. I think that it quickly turns people off if they aren’t able to building something interesting. I certainly understand wanting to get results quickly. A lot of electronics that I play with is just for hobby and fun, so if I’m going to spend my precious leisure time on something, it shouldn’t take a week to bear fruit on my first project. ...

This is a teardown of the IKEA TVÄRS lamp and provides two small but fun projects you can do with this very versatile, very affordable lamp from IKEA: a controllable RGB lamp and a lit charging station. Disassembling this lamp is pretty simple! First unclip the bulb holder from the base as follows (the wire was already removed in this case): Next using needle nose pliers, reach in and grip the contacts and pull. The contacts will bend a little, and then pop out. ...

Fixing Jlink DLL issues with nRFgo Studio This post serves as a collection of help tutorials that I found useful when getting started with the nRF52. Related: Jlink not detected in nRFgo Studio, Failed to find JLINK dll. Had a spot of trouble fixing this one. However, uninstalling everything and reinstalling everything made it work again. How to fix Uninstall Nordic, Jlink, Segger software Remove all registry keys of Nordic, Jlink or Segger software using regedit ...

Towards Better Biking Safety Background I met the excellent Signals team at Maker Faire Singapore in July. They were developing the product The Official Signal. Figure 1. The Official Signal It appears to be a motion-sensing bike attachment. From what I could tell the detection was based on detecting a spike in acceleration when the user turns their head, and this turns on the light. While they were not able to share the details of their platform with me because it was proprietary, I did gain a few important ideas from talking to them. ...

Now that we’ve got all our wireless programming tools set up, we will begin to interface with the Night Light directly. Say I want a different color? Fiddling with the RGB values is fun up to a certain point. This tutorial will teach you how to set up a service in the Adafruit IO to change the light from your phone. We will utilise the Adafruit IO since it is very easy to set up and use. ...

It has been awhile since I last posted. Since I am away from most of my tools, most of my focus has been on design. I made a fairly decent personal website to showcase my projects at benjamenlim.com. I also remade the ULCEK website because it wasn’t as I had envisioned it to be and was only an early design. Currently ulcek.com is still under construction but this is an early preview of how it is to look like: ...

I first came across Zest while browsing the Adafruit blog. It struck me as one of the better put together student projects and I was very impressed by the completeness, both by it’s technical aspects and the design, so naturally I wanted to see what other projects the team has done. One project in particular stood out to me: New Day by Arielle Chapin. It is very well designed new tab extension that you can add to Chrome. I edited the code and it is now on Github and the Chrome Webstore. ...

This is a very condensed tutorial on how to set up an OrangePi running Armbian as an access point to intercept Dash Button commands, allowing you to have wireless buttons on the cheap. This is a project that migrates the existing solution I had on my Raspberry Pi 3 to the OrangePi, which frees up my Raspberry Pi 3 for other tasks, since most of the commands are replicated, the commands are listed here in order to set up the OrangePi. This tutorial borrows very heavily from frillip’s tutorial and the python script borrows from Familab’s tutorial. ...

Chronicling my adventures of making and remixing various boards with the marvelous SAMD21 M0+ chip in all it’s various incarnations. The link to the GitHub page is here. Why the Cortex M0+? It is a very popular choice for hardware companies for providing a mid-level chip that is more powerful than an Arduino but less powerful than a Teensy. So there was already existing support. I have also worked with ARM before (M4!) and I was reasonably familiar with the process of programming it as compared to using a PIC-based chip. ...

So some cheap Ardunino Nano and the WeMos D1 Mini use the CH340G drivers. This has caused some users that are on Yosemite or later to experience persistent rebooting issues. The current fix is to use a newer version of the WeMos D1 Mini, ie the WeMos D1 mini Pro that uses a CP2104 driver to communicate with the computer.