This is the third part of the meta-tutorial, where I talk about designing a cheap plant watering sensor. If you did not already read the first and second part, please do it now. These parts contain a lot information which lead to this point of the tutorial. The second part ended with step 14, designing a first prototype PCB. So…
Category: Learn
How to Design a Cheap Plant Watering Sensor (Part 2)
This is the second part of the meta-tutorial, where I talk about designing a cheap plant watering sensor. If you did not already read the first part, please do it now. It contains a lot information about constraints and decisions made which lead to this point. The first part ended with step 11, building a working prototype…
How to Design a Cheap Plant Watering Sensor (Part 1)
In this article I will talk about how I designed a cheap plant watering sensor. My goal is some kind of meta tutorial, where you can see the steps involved from the initial idea to the final sensor. If you ever planed to create a own device, I hope this article give you some inspiration…
Soldering for Show
This article is about soldering for show. While usually you solder electronic components to make the best possible connection and keep everything working, this is just to make a great visual result. If you want to take photos from your projects or would like to impress a customer with a nice looking prototype, you have to solder with more…
SMD Components Under the Microscope
Today I took some photos from common SMD components using a microscope. From naked eye, this components look so tiny and fascinating perfect. Looking at them using a microscope, they do not look that perfect anymore. I cropped the pictures to make the picture better visible at lower resolutions. I always put a scale, which…
How to use the Scripts in the Cat Protector Project
It seems the cat protector project documentation has a small gap. There is just a hint that you have to use some scripts to prepare the SD card to play the audio files, but no details about this. To use the scripts you need some knowledge how to use a command line interface on your…
All Meggy Jr RGB Colors
I created a complete color table with the impression of all possible 4096 Meggy Jr RGB colors. The green LED is much brighter than the other two LEDs, the first tables used blue as base which does not make much sense. So I created a second set of tables which use the bright green as…
How to Debug Time Critical Code using an Oscilloscope
From time to time you have to debug time critical code. If you are using interrupts, you are interested in the actual performance on the code. This is especially true, if you are using timed interrupts. In this cases, using the serial interface is impossible. If you write to the serial interface, the whole timing…
How and Why to use Namespaces
Namespaces are a feature of C++ which address the problem of name conflicts. There is a “global” namespace, where everything lives which was declared without namespace. Especially the Arduino environment declares a huge amount of variables and constants there, so it is a good practice to put everything you write in a own namespace. Namespaces…