Update: Weller solved the problems I describe in this article with a new design of the retainer. This new retainer solves all the problems described in this article. The new retainer looks very different and uses a spring to pull the tip to the heating element. A little bit more than a half year ago…
Soldering Boldport Club project “The Matrix”
For the Boldport Club project “The Matrix” I used hot air soldering for the first time. After some experimenting and with help from Boldport Club members, it worked really well. I could colder the 120 LEDs in less than 10 minutes to the board. I made a video about the process. Please keep in mind, I…
Plant Watering Sensor – Long Term Logging
To gather more long-term measurements for the capacitive method I use for my plant watering sensor, I created this small logging device. As you can see, it uses one of the plant watering sensor prototypes for the measurements. Instead of using the ATtiny13A on the board, it passes the oscillator signal directly to the microprocessor…
How to Design a Cheap Plant Watering Sensor (Part 5)
This is the fifth part of the meta-tutorial, where I talk about designing a cheap plant watering sensor. If you did not already read the first, second, third and fourth part, please do it now. These parts contain a lot information which lead to this point of the tutorial. The fourth part ended with step 20, where I did usability tests and stability…
12 Time Wasting Issues in Autodesk EAGLE
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,…