Category Archives: Featured


A Simple Solar Irradiation Measurement Technique

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A pyranometer or solar irradiation tester is measurement tool that is a must-have for every professional in renewable energy sector. However, owing one is not easy because it is both expensive and rare. It is expensive because it uses highly calibrated components and it is rare because it is not an ordinary multi-meter that is available in common hardware shops. Personally, I have a long professional career in the field of LED lighting, renewable energy (mainly solar), Lithium and industrial battery systems, electronics and embedded-systems. I have been at the core of designing, testing, commissioning and analyzing some of the

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Exploring STC 8051 Microcontrollers – Coding

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About STC8A8K64S4A12 Microcontroller and its Development Board This is the continuation of my first post on STC 8051 Microcontrollers here. Many Chinese microcontroller manufacturers develop awesome and cheap general-purpose MCUs using the popular 8051 architecture. There are many reasons for that but most importantly the 8051 architecture is a very common one that has been around for quite a long time. Secondly, manufacturing MCUs with 8051 DNA allows manufacturers to focus less on developing their own proprietary core and to give more effort in adding features. Holtek, Nuvoton, STC, etc are a few manufacturers to name.

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Making a SPL dB Meter

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In the 1980s, there was no internet as like today and so the sources of entertainment were televisions, radios and cassette players. When I was a kid, we had an audio cassette player. We used it to play songs but my imagination was always fixed to its VU meter display with its fancy readings as shown below. It changed with the volume of the speakers and matched rhythmically with the sound coming out of it. During my engineering career, I got to know about the Decibel scale and sound pressure measurement. It soon became a goal for me to design

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Tutorial 9: ESP8266 and WS2812B RGB LED (or NeoPixel) ring

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This tutorial describes how to interface a WS2812B RGB LED ring or Adafruit’s NeoPixel ring to ESP8266. The WS2812B is a smart RGB LED with a control circuit integrated in a 5050 SMD package. The RGB data transfer occurs through a single data input line using single NZR communication mode. Connection between the NeoPixel ring and ESP8266 is through a single data wire. I am using EasyESP-1 here for illustration. The Data In (DI) line of the NeoPixel ring connects to D1 pin of EasyESP-1. VCC and GND pins go to 3.3V and GND terminals of EasyESP-1. I used a 40 RGB LED NeoPixel-compatible LED

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Programmable LED dimmer using PIC16F18325

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LUKAS FÄSSLER designed a versatile programmable LED dimmer using PIC16F18325 MCU to drive white and RGB LEDs. It operates at a wide range of power supply (6 to 26 volts) and utilizes MOSFET drivers with non-inverting outputs. The mosfet drivers are basically the same as before but now with non-inverting outputs: LM5111-1M. There are two of them for a total of 4 outputs compared to only 3 with the previous version. They now drive much (physically) smaller but no less capable mosfets which allowed me to significantly downsize the whole board to 75x65mm.  The NXP BUK9Y12-40E are rated at 40

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