If you have any spare old phones with no use lying around, you may want to use their batteries to build this portable charger for your new smartphone. On the electronics side, this project only requires a LiPo battery charger module and a step-up voltage converter module, both of which can be bought for less than $5 on eBay.
DIY portable phone charger
Rui Santos has written a short tutorial about creating a standalone web server using an ESP8266 module that can toggle two LEDs through a web interface. He first flashed the ESP-01 module with NodeMCU so that he could program the ESP8266 chip with LUA script. After that it gets pretty easy to modify the ESP8266 firmware for WiFi connection, controlling the GPIOs, etc.
ESP8266 web server
And don’t forget to check out our breadboard friendly adapters for ESP-01 modules that provides clear pin labels printed on the board to make prototyping with the ESP-01 module easier.
ESP-01 breadboard adapter
The ESP8266 Wifi-to-serial transceiver is the latest and most inexpensive way to get your project connected to the Internet. If you wonder how to setup up this thing in your project, this Start-Up PDF guide from rancidbacon.com will be very helpful to you.
Out of many ESP8266 modules available in the market, the ESP-01 version is the most popular one. While the headers are 0.1″ pitch, the pin arrangements are not breadboard friendly and are not labeled on board, which makes it little inconvenient for breadboarding. So you might be interested in our Breadboard Friendly Adapter (shown below) with clear pin labels printed on the board to make prototyping with the ESP-01 module easier.
Jesus Echavarria’s PICnano is a breadboard-friendly breakout board for the PIC18F2550 microcontroller in an Arduino Nano form factor.
PICnano board
The goal of this new design is try to have an Arduino Nano compatible module but with some new features, such have direct access to the power supply microcontroller. First of all, here you can download the schematic of the board: PICNANO BREADBOARD SCHEMATIC V1.0.
The board is based on the PIC18F2550 microcontroller, here you can download the datasheet.
Electro-Labs new tutorial project is a PIC microcontroller-based digital power meter that will let you measure the power consumption of an electrical appliance connected to the 230V/50Hz mains line. The project implements a resistor-divider network to scale down the mains voltage and then uses MCP3202 ADC chip to convert the scaled AC voltage to digital counts. For current measurement, the ACS712-30A hall-effect sensor is used in conjunction with another MCP3202 chip. The digital outputs from the ADC chips are then read by the PIC18F252 microcontroller for computing the power. The measured AC RMS voltage, current, and Watts are then displayed on the dot matrix LCD. The beauty of this project is the meter itself is powered from the mains, thus avoiding the need for an external power source.
PIC-based AC watt meter