Thursday 30 August 2018

Arduino, WS2812 Addressable LEDS, FastLED Library

 
video by Andrew Tuline

We all do it, try something new, have a little play with things then stand back to admire our most recent achievement. Then curiosity leads us to down the youtube path, to see how other people are doing in this field.

Arduino is no exception. I was so proud of myself after purchasing some small WS2812 Driver boards and with a little bit of coding I finally created my rear night flashing cycle lights! (project will be uploaded very soon)


To be honest here, this is pretty extreme for such a simple project, normal LEDs would have worked just as well, if not better. But !!!

I wanted to be different!!

Very proud of my self with my projects results, where part of the code required the FastLED library. So I decided to look up the creator and he gave some really good advice and there are some really great demo codes you can try.


Also visit his youtube channel:-


I feel I have found one of the pioneers in this field, and his demo codes are freely available, well commented with hints on how to change to suit ones purposes.

I want to make christmas tree lights just like in that video, but baby steps first!!

Sunday 26 August 2018

Simple Arduino Proyotyping Setup


Simple setup; an Arduino Uno R3, breadboard, component tester, power source all combined onto a single plastic case that makes this an extremely versatile project.

This is the 2nd one I've made, by adding the component tester it made sense. I have so many loose components lying around I got too lazy to search up there values, it was far easier to just grab new parts out of the labeled drawers, very wasteful.

What I get out of this:-
- a "portable" arduino prototyping board
- a component tester
- an USB powerbank (charge your mobile phone)

Stored inside the case:
- arduino USB cable
- an ATtiny85 shield
- an TTL UART convertor
- microUSB cable
- arduino pro mini
- pocket multimeter

Thursday 23 August 2018

Linux Mint 19 Xfce Installed


This is something I should've done last month the moment it came out, I did not like the previous 18.3 KDE environment at all but did give it a good try.

Xfce works for me!

Re-installing all the programs  I cannot live without.

Sunday 5 August 2018

Basics to Transistor Selection


This is similar to how I select a transistor along with calculating the value of the Base Resistor required to place the transistor in saturation mode; ie a transistor in switching On/OFF mode. There is no point is creating my own video when this explains quite clearly the process.

A project is currently under way where I use this process, soon to be posted. Just a small heads up, the following small switching Transistor is my all time favorite, the S8050 NPN transistor :-)

Datasheet: S8050 Wing Shing Computer Components.


click here to go to ebay listing
So cheap .....

Wednesday 1 August 2018

Backup FireFox Bookmarks and Favorite Extensions

Yes this seems to be an obvious option to find, but for years I have been using an extension called FEBE with FireFox which now no longer exists. So I finally used DuckGo to find the solution and here it is :-) So now when I change my hardware everything can easily be moved to the new machine. It's a shame I cannot export FireFox passwords but I guess that is a good thing, I also use Keepass2 which works just as good.

These extensions I cannot live without, especially the NoScript which is my all time favorite.

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