Posts tagged ‘Weekend Project’

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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. Read more →

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Arachnouphobia

Catchy title aside, this one is actually about deterring spiders. This small project started with my mother’s observation that a corner of her basement was spider-free since I had set up a NAS there. Rather than assuming that the vibrations/noises generated by the hard drive put the spiders off (like I would), she made a connection the Banana Pi’s irregularly flashing LEDs. That had to be investigated. A RGB LED, a breadboard, an ATTiny, and some batteries to test the hypothesis. Read more →

The power bank in use: a small rectangular grey box is shown on top of a lead gel battery with a USB cable connected to one of the sockets on its left side. On its top right side, a small grey power switch and a green power indicator LED are poking through the case. The module is connected via the 6.3 mm contacts, which also holds it in place on top of the battery.

The grey box with the top lid of the case removed, revealing a PCB with the USB A sockets, power switch, LED and a few electrolytic capacitors on top. At the front of the picture, the battery contacts (soldered to the bottom of the PCB) and their holes in the case can be seen.

Pb Power bank

In preparation for being off-grid for a few days, I quickly built this ‘power bank’ around a 12 V 7 Ah lead gel battery. The circuit is simply pushed onto the battery’s 6.3 mm contacts and provides 3 USB ports. Charging circuitry is not included but the battery terminals are still accessible anyway.