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Author Archives: R-B

Water quality monitor for your pool

Posted on May 25, 2017 by R-B Leave a comment

Are you tired of checking the pH level and chlorine concentration of water in your swimming pool everyday? This Pool Buddy project from Johan Brichau might be helpful for you to monitor the water quality automatically. It will also upload the data online continuously so that you can easily access it from anywhere. It uses the Ph and ORP kits by atlas-scientific.com for sensing the water quality and the Particle Photon for collecting the sensor data and sending them to an online database over the WiFi connection. A small solar panel is also mounted to keep the device running autonomously.

Pool water quality monitor

The Photon firmware boots the device every 5 minutes and takes a series of measurements during one minute: pH, ORP, temperature, battery charge and WiFi strength. The average of each measurement is sent as an event to the Particle cloud where an integration made by Particle takes care of forwarding those events to the Google pub/sub service. On the Google cloud platform, I have a cloud function that stores the value in a datastore.

ESP8266 internet radio

Posted on May 24, 2017 by R-B Leave a comment

Tom Tobback built an ESP8266 internet radio based off Edzelf’s excellent Esp-radio project. It uses NodeMCU ESP8266 board for connecting to various internet radio stations and the VS1053 module for decoding the mp3 stream. A TFT display is used in the project to show relevant information such as which radio station is being played. The firmware for ESP8266 is developed using Arduino IDE. The radio also features a built-in web server to allow the user to configure settings and add/modify favorite radio stations. The radio box has a volume control knob and 2 push buttons for channel up and down functions. Tom also added an class-D audio amplifier to boost the output from VS1053 module and two18650 type Lithium ion cells for powering his radio station. For more details of his radio project, visit his project page.

ESP8266 internet radio box

Arduino guitar pedal

Posted on May 23, 2017 by R-B 2 comments

This Arduino-based multi-effect guitar pedal is an open source design for guitarists and hackers. The design is made simple and customizable so that you can program it to make your own effect without an in-depth knowledge of digital signal processing.

The project is Open Source & Open Hardware and aimed for guitarists, hackers and programmers that want to learn about digital signal processing, effects, synthesizers and experiment without deep knowledge on DSP, electronics or hardcore programming.

Arduino guitar pedal

Flexible smartwatch using e-ink display

Posted on May 23, 2017 by R-B Leave a comment

Nick Ames aims to build a thin and flexible smartwatch with a wrap-around touchscreen display made of a 4.9″, 720×120 EPD (e-ink) screen. Besides time telling, the smartphone also features health sensors to count your steps and monitor pulse rate and blood oxygen level. This is also Nick’s official entry to Hackaday 2017 contest. Check out his project page for more details on it.

Flexible smartwatch using e-ink display

Making a self-balancing robot using Arduino

Posted on May 22, 2017 by R-B Leave a comment

Two-wheel self-balancing robots are pretty cool and could be challenging to make for beginners. Joop Brokking describes the build process of his amazingly stable self-balancing robot in a video tutorial posted below. The robot uses two stepper motors for precise motion that is controlled by an Arduino board. The angular inclinations data are derived using a MPU6050 gyro/accelerometer. You can download the design files and firmware from Joop’s website.

Self-balancing robot

Joop’s YouTube video tutorial is posted below:

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