Author Archives: steve

Driving Cheap EBay OLED Displays With Arduino

Posted on March 18, 2013 by steve

Over the last couple of years I’ve picked up a few little 128×64 OLED displays, mostly through EBay auction sniping.  These displays are similar to those offered by Adafruit, likely using the same chip-on-glass (COG) OLED display with a SSD1306 … Continue reading →

Posted in Arduino | Leave a comment

Vintage Digital VT420 Terminal on Raspberry Pi

Posted on December 16, 2012 by steve

My first gig straight out of school involved supporting a large group of CAD drafters and engineers at a government facility. We used several different CAD systems at the time – AutoCAD on PC, DEC CALMA on Vax 11/785, and … Continue reading →

Posted in Raspberry Pi | 2 Comments

Cook Technologies Steel Raspberry Pi Case

Posted on December 3, 2012 by steve

I discovered this case while browsing through eBay looking at Raspberry Pi offerings. I’ve been looking for a slightly more rugged case for one of my Pis, and this one seemed to fit the bill nicely. Some may argue that … Continue reading →

Posted in Raspberry Pi, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Raspberry Pi: first impressions and bluetooth configuration instructions

Posted on December 2, 2012 by steve

I got my first Pi a couple of months ago and finally got around to testing it out. Initial impressions are very favorable – it’s a well-engineered little embedded board. Performance is not stellar, but is about what one should … Continue reading →

Posted in MQTT, Raspberry Pi | Leave a comment

1,001 Uses for the Cypress PSOC-1

Posted on November 24, 2012 by steve

I discovered the Cypress PSoC family of microcontrollers via the FreeSOC Kickstarter Project. It’s a really neat idea; Rather than producing a bunch of variants of their MCU parts with different peripheral options, Cypress PSoC parts leave the wiring of … Continue reading →

Posted in PSoC | Tagged | Leave a comment

Excellent AVR-Eclipse setup HOWTO

Posted on September 28, 2012 by steve

The Arduino environment and associated hardware is nice and very straightforward for quick-and-dirty prototyping and development, but it’s sometimes overkill. Some projects just don’t need a full Atmega328. Atmel manufactures a wide variety of 8-bit MCUs with different features to … Continue reading →

Posted in AVR | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Dangerous Prototypes Big Box of Parts

Posted on September 26, 2012 by steve

I discovered The Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronics Junk (TGIMBOEJ for short, ranking right up there as Worst Acronym Ever) recently. It’s a neat idea; sign up on The TGIMBOEJ site and a box chock full ‘o stuff magically … Continue reading →

Posted in Electronics | Leave a comment

Hacking Eaton HomeHeartbeat Part 8: Sensors

Posted on March 5, 2012 by steve

This post documents my research into the HHB sensors, complete with pretty pictures. With the exception of the power sensor, these devices are all variations on a similar theme. They all contain the same Atmel ATMega64L MCU and Ember EM2420 … Continue reading →

Posted in ZigBee | Tagged | 15 Comments

Hacking Eaton HomeHeartbeat Part 7: Success!

Posted on March 4, 2012 by steve

Spent a good deal of time on Saturday working with the Base Station and my collection of sensors. I’ve managed to decipher enough information from both the Serial and ZigBee side of things to come up with a workable solution … Continue reading →

Posted in ZigBee | Tagged | 10 Comments

Digital Electronics Basics: Open Collector Outputs

Posted on February 29, 2012 by steve

Check out the excellent overview of open collector outputs over on the Evil Mad Scientist page.

Posted in Electronics Basics | Leave a comment