I am a machine engineer and very used to work with CAD software. The abbreviation CAD stands for Computer Aided Design. I personally think, Autodesk Eagle fails with the ‘A’, because often it does not give you any aid. On the contrary it often puts a spoke in the wheel and makes your life horrible….
How to Design a Cheap Plant Watering Sensor (Part 4)
This is the fourth part of the meta-tutorial, where I talk about designing a cheap plant watering sensor. If you did not already read the first, second and third part please do it now. These parts contain a lot information which lead to this point of the tutorial. The third part ended with step 18, planing the final firmware. There a decision…
How to Design a Cheap Plant Watering Sensor (Part 3)
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…
A Versatile ATtiny Programming Adapter
As mentioned in my article about designing a cheap plant watering sensor, I built a small adapter which can be used to pre-program the ATtiny13A. This is necessary, because once soldered on the board, I only have a debugWire interface, which has to be enabled first. The adapter has a small 50mil JTAG header, where…
Plant Watering Sensor – Precise Current Measurement
As I wrote in the first part of my article, how to design a cheap plant watering sensor, I had troubles to get exact measurements of the current, using my Testo multimeter. I searched for a solution and found the µCurrent Gold device, from David L. Jones known for the EEVblog. Later a little bit…
SMD LEDs Tests
Today I tested a number of SMD LEDs for the plant watering sensor project. I soldered all 13 LEDs I shortlisted onto a small board and connected it to an Arduino Zero Pro. So I could try the different flashing styles I planed to use more or less automatically. That way I could focus on the LED flashing itself,…
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…
The Fan Controller Wrapped Up
Yesterday I found some time to put the fan controller in a casing. I used a very cheap no-name case with the dimensions 130 × 68 × 44 mm. First I drilled some 2.5mm holes into the lid, and fastened the Arduino board on it using M2.5 spacers. You see the bottom of the case in the…
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…
SMD Adapters from Adafruit
Today most chips are only available in SMD packages, therefore I often need adapter boards for prototyping. There are only a few manufacturer of adapter boards and they are often very expensive. I think the reason for the high price is, because most of this boards are made to replace DIL chips in devices with SMD ones….