I preformed the electrical tests for the Hackulator again and they tested good. I also had to shave down the faux connector so that the battery panel laid flat. I also took a sharpie and colored any places that should be black. The calculator is looking really great and it's pretty much just software that I need to work on at this point.

I went ahead and connected the X10 FireCracker to the Wio Link since it is WiFi capable and I thought it would make a great board to control the FireCracker with. My only concern was that the Wio Link/ESP8266 uses 3.3V logic and since the FireCracker has an RF...

Tonight I almost completely finished assembling the Hackulator. I decided I was going to glue the rear cover on so I could cut more of the insides away because it was so tight. I ended up using hot glue to place things inside and had to make a few minor adjustments such as making wires longer or re-gluing parts in a slightly different place. I had accidentally pulled an SMD LED off with some hot glue and overheated it while trying to solder. I was able to put a different LED on in it's place, but it's red instead of blue. I still need to do some final checks to make sure everything still works...

So I worked on the software setup for the Hackulator so that I could perform some hardware testing. I had written a little document that outlined the steps of what I did, so I followed those and installed the battery monitor. When I ran it, I got a reading, but it appeared way off. Upon closer inspection, I had discovered that I soldered the 2 resistors in the wrong places. After swapping those I still wasn't getting a good voltage value. After looking at some data sheets, I discovered there's a few differences with the SPI communications between the MCP3008 and MCP3002. After making some adju...

Ok, it looks like my Smart Home project Version 2.0 is going to be a big focus here soon. This has really been in the planning for a long time. You might wonder why I say Version 2.0 and that's because back around 1996 or so, I had set up my home with all sorts of X10 devices. Most of them were the Radio Shack Plug n Power devices, but they were really just relabeled. I even had bought a kit from X10 that included a module to connect to my computer's serial port and control them. It was a pretty extensive setup and I had a lot of fun doing it. I still have the majority of those X10 devices sta...

I received my Function Generator today and it works great. I discovered how to use the X-Y Timebase on my Oscilloscope to draw a circle using 2 Sine Wave Inputs. I made some other pretty shapes by adjusting the frequency. One cool thing I would like to try in the future is creating square waves that would initialize something like an LCD.

I also received the AIY Vision Kit and assembled it without a problem. I only had issues when trying to boot it up because it would go to a black screen and freeze. With a quick search, I found the trick was to add over_voltage=4 to the config file directly o...

Well, I still haven't had time to work on my projects, but I should very soon. My wife left this morning to Colorado to help her Mom for a couple of months and the reason I haven't been able to work on my projects is because I was helping with all of the packing. I'm going to PAX tomorrow, so I'll be busy all day, but I should be able to resume projects on Monday.

I took the opportunity to set up my work area a little better today. I still want to mount some shelves and set up another lamp or two, but I have much more desk space. While working on things, I had an idea for another project. It's...

It will still be another few days before I can work on my projects again. I ordered a SSD1306 OLED Module for about $8 so that I can display the settings for my function generator on the it. It works at 3.3V, has only 4 pins, and works with U8GLIB which should make adding it quite simple. Plus it's small, so it doesn't hog much room on the breadboard.

I learned that the Bus Pirate can be used as an AVR programmer, so if I make my own circuit with an AVR then I shouldn't need to buy a separate programmer for it. I updated the firmware on the BP to the latest community version. I also wrote functions for the waves to return a float between -1 and 1 which I can change the amplitude on and it's working great. Triangle wave was a little different than I thought because it is either rising or falling. I now have it providing around 6000 samples of data per cycle, but I think I can squeeze some more out of it if I am able to use an interrupt timer...

I haven't had much time to work on my projects this past week and probably won't for at least another 4 days. However, I did end up ordering a reasonably priced Arbitrary Waveform Generator for about $90 that seems to get good reviews on the internet, but it will take up to a month to arrive. So I may still try and build one with locally sourced parts that's reasonably priced.

I ordered and received an Arduino Due because I wanted to play around with the DACs on it. I bought a genuine one and it actually jumped up in price by about $10 just after I bought it. I ordered and received a 12-bit DA...

I attempted to print the part again on my 3D printer, but it was not extruding properly and failed midway into the print. However, I printed off a nice little case for my Bus Pirate. I may end up redoing that one though. It was a bit thin for my taste and I have the OpenSCAD file, so thickening it shouldn't be a problem. Plus it's a relatively simple design.

I had another idea for a project. One of the things that annoys me about my dremel tool is that it takes like an hour to charge the battery and it runs out in about 5-10 minutes. I do like the option of having it be cordless though. So my ...