Author Archives: R-B

Portable power supply with built-in batteries

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Most of the bench power supplies we use derive power from the main AC supply. ThomasVDD presents his Arduino-controlled smart power supply with built-in battery backup so that you can use it anywhere without an AC outlet. It not only delivers precise output, but is also controllable via PC over an USB port.

Key Features

  • Constant voltage and constant current modes
  • Uses a low noise linear regulator, preceded by a tracking preregulator to minimize power dissipation
  • Use of handsolderable components to keep the project accessible
  • Powered by ATMEGA328P, programmed with Arduino IDE
  • PC communication via Java application over micro USB
  • Powered by 2 protected 18650 Lithium Ion cells
  • 18 mm spaced banana plugs for compatibility with BNC adapters
Computer controlled power supply

Computer controlled power supply

A DIY GPS tracking device for hikers

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A handy GPS tracker designed by woytekm for tracking and recording your hiking trips on a microSD card. It also features a Nokia 3310 LCD for showing current GPS position, altitude, track length, track duration and time. More details of the design are found at the author’s Github page.

DIY GPS tracker for hiking trips

DIY GPS tracker for hiking trips

This device does not provide any map or direction info. It just shows GPS position, altitude, track length, track duration and current time. Track data is written to micro SD card as GPX file. Nothing too ingenious, but still quite handy if you like to gather the data on your hike. Thanks to large capacity 18650 rechargeable battery and low power circuitry (nRF51822 SoC) device can last well over 50 hours on one charge, which is enough for five day backpacking trip (thanks to track resume function it can be switched on and off with an “open” track), or 48h non stop ultra hike that i do once a year (that was primary purpose of this build).

Arduino controlled autonomous cooler

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This Arduino-powered autonomous cooler follows you to the park or beach by connecting to your smartphone via Bluetooth, and is also GPS-enabled to self-navigate. The electronics is powered by a 5V power supply, whereas a 3s LiPo battery is used to power the motors. Controlled with an Android App, the cooler also features motorized lid that can be opened through the App.

Autonomous cooler

Autonomous cooler

A HC-05 Bluetooth module was mounted at the front of the platform for better range. The rest of the components including a L298N motor driver, PAM-7Q GPS, and HMC6883L compass were mounted inside and connected to the Arduino through the breadboard.

The compass works with I2C, so we connected the SLC and SDA pins to A5 and A4 respectively. The rest of the pins were connected through digital I/O. For more information on how we connected the wires, see the diagrams provided in the schematics section below.

A simple solar-powered IoT weather station

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BME280 is a fully integrated environmental unit from Bosch that combines sensors for pressure, humidity, and temperature in a tiny 8-pin metal-lid LGA package of size 2.5 x 2.5 x 0.93 mm³. Because of its compact size, ease of use (BME280 supports standard I2C and SPI interfaces), and availability of supporting open-source Arduino libraries, BME280 is very popular among weather enthusiasts. We have seen its usage in our weather webserver project and standalone weather station tutorial before. This Instructable describes a similar weather station based on ESP8266 and BME280 and is solar-powered. The entire circuit is housed inside a 3-D printed enclosure.

Solar-powered weather station

Solar-powered weather station

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