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 ...

This weekend I worked some more on my 3D printer with trying to make some larger prints. I updated to the latest version of Marlin and increased some of the printing speeds. I tried out some larger prints, but it seems that 80 degrees celsius wasn't cutting it for the print bed. I was able to get it to 100 now that I have a thermistor right next to the heating plate. Also, the heating plate isn't perfectly flat anymore, so I took out the glass, cleaned it off, put a sheet of Kapton tape on it and clipped it on top of the heating plate, and re-leveled the bed.

After about 6 hours, I successfull...

The circuit boards came today. I went and soldered the components on the board and spent a bunch of time carving up the insides of the calculator (plastic removal). I still need to figure out where to solder the switch for the PowerBoost and and then it will just be figuring out where to mount stuff. I will probably be using a combination of superglue, hot glue, and possibly making something on the 3D printer.

Since I now have my 3D printer working, I decided to finish designing the camera adapter for my car. Unfortunately it's getting late, so I will need to wait for another day to actually print it off. It's very possible that I'll need to print it off multiple times while making adjustments in between, but that's the nature of prototyping. Fortunately I made it quite easy to make any adjustments just by changing a few parameters. After I get it all worked out, I may throw it up on Thingiverse in case somebody else with a similar car runs into the same issue.

While I was looking back at some older...