Posts tagged ‘STM32’

This Is Where I Draw The Line

So I’ve had a pen plotter for quite a while now. It has shown up a few years back in a post on this site, where I used it for its intended purpose—recording X–Y curves. This plotter is quite a beast, it’s big (up to DIN A3) and heavy, and it’s unlike the majority of vintage plotters you’ll see people using online. This HP 7045A is fully analogue, which means it takes an X voltage and a Y voltage and directly controls the axis motors with analogue servo loops. In fact, it’s more correctly referred to as a recorder, rather than a plotter, since its purpose is to record measurement charts.

Please Do Not Water This Tree

About two years ago, I made a little LED tree as a gift. An extremely simple design with 17 white 0603 LEDs soldered to magnet wire, twisted and bent to make branches, and combined them to a small LED bonsai. Electrically, all LEDs are wired in parallel and connected to 4.5 V via an LDR. This lets the tree react to the ambient brightness and helps it to great battery life.

A Better STM32F0 Prototyping Experience

This project started when I was particularly annoyed by existing development board options and cheap Chinese PCB prototyping services were starting to emerge. Thus, the path forward was clear, but let’s start with the problems I was trying to solve.

When I’m talking about ‘development boards’, I mean boards like the Teensy models, Feather variants or blue pill: a PCB based laid out around a microcontroller containing very little extra circuitry; a ‘least common denominator’ of typical projects using that MCU, if you will. Evaluation boards with more interesting circuitry are great to get used to a microcontroller and its peripherals but lie beyond the scope of this post.

Building a Camera with a Rather Undersized Microcontroller

Disclaimer: This project was hacked together more or less in a weekend. Not much documentation is available besides the source code. If you want to build this (in the off-chance that you got your hands on one of these printer modules), you’d have to extract the schematic information from pinning.h and supply your own stepper motor driver and level shifter circuit.

I had these thermal printer modules, 4 of them, after I bought them because they were cheap and seemed interesting. For years they physically were somewhere in a drawer; in my mind though, they were taunting me. Something had to be done!