Author Archives: R-B

Musical holiday card with a CD case

Dmitry Griberg’s musical holiday card project is really cool and plays a full song in full fidelity from an SD card. The project uses Attiny85 microcontroller and a 4-MOSFET amplifier circuit, both powered from a LiPo battery. The complete circuit is enclosed inside a CD case, and a simple flexible metal strip is used to make a contact sensor that will activate the player when the CD case is opened. The songs are saved on the SD card as WAV files with 32KHz sampling rate and 8-bit samples.

Musical holiday card

Musical holiday card


Here is a demo video of this:

ESP8266 module and breadboard adapter kit

Elecrow is now offering the popular ESP-01 Serial-to-WiFi transceiver module along with our breadboard adapter kit for simplifying the prototyping of the ESP8266-based IoT applications. While you can buy the breadboard kit alone from our Tindie Store, we don’t ship it worldwide. Elecrow offers worldwide shipping at reasonably lower shipping costs.

ESP8266 module and breadboard adapter

ESP8266 module and breadboard adapter

ESP8266 is an inexpensive serial-to-wifi tranceiver chip that allows to connect any microcontroller with a serial port to a WiFi network. Because of its simplicity and low cost, it is getting popular among hobbyists for building Internet of Things (IoT) applications. While there are varieties of breakout boards available for ESP8266 from the Chinese markets, the most popular one is the ESP-01 version that provides access to the ESP8266 pins through a 2×4 male header. 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. We have designed this very simple breadboard friendly adapter (shown below) with clear pin labels printed on the board to make prototyping with the ESP-01 module easier.

Breadboard adapter makes prototyping easier

The adapter has a 2×4 female header to receive the ESP-01 module and a 10uF power supply filter on board. The ESP-01 module pins are accessible through two single row headers that are breadboard friendly.

Buy Adapter only from Elecrow Store (recommended for international buyers)

Buy Adapter plus ESP-01 module from Elecrow Store (recommended for international buyers)

Buy Adapter only from our US store (recommended for US customers)

Portable multifunctional tool with Nokia 3310 casing

Mastro Gippo’s 1337 3310 multifunctional portable tool is hacker’s Swiss knife in the shell of Nokia’s most durable and iconic 3310 phone and is also the winner of Hackaday’s Trinket Everyday Carry Contest. It features ohmmeter, graphing multimeter with simultaneous measurements of current and voltage, as well as instantaneous and average power consumption measurements that help to estimate the battery life of your prototypic design. He also maintained the original look and feel of Nokia 3310 by developing the similar user interface for his tool. The continuity tester feature plays the original Nokia tune as output.

Nokia 3310 portable multifunctional tool

Nokia 3310 portable multifunctional tool

 

Shower room door sensor

James and his other colleagues often bike to work to stay healthy. The problem is their work place has only one shower stall. So he built this shower room door sensor to provide an at-desk indication of whether the shower room is free or occupied so that he doesn’t have to run to the bathroom to check its status. While there are other similar projects done before, this has a distinguishing feature that it detects the bolt of the door lock, and therefore it is more reliable than just sensing if the door is shut. He used some paper-clips and post-it notes to build the sensor part and Spark Core to read the sensor output and push the occupancy status to a web page.

Shower room occupency sensor

Shower room occupency sensor

Using BMP180 for temperature, pressure and altitude measurements

The BMP180 is a new generation digital barometric pressure and temperature sensor from Bosch Sensortec. In this tutorial, we will briefly review this device and describe how to interface it with an Arduino Uno board for measuring the surrounding temperature and pressure. We will also discuss about retrieving the sensor altitude from its pressure readings.

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Temperature, pressure and altitude measurements using BMP180

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