Let’s begin the building of our mini quadricopter, starting from the assembly of the frame. Unfortunately, I immediately faced a problem: the kit included screws whose diameter was too small to tighten the spacers! Here’s a comparison between some correct screws I had in my lab and the ones included in the kit: I contacted Bangood’s customer support…
It’s winter, therefore I decided to build a mini quadcopter to do some indoor flight. I chose to assemble a “class” 180 quadcopter, that is a quadcopter with diagonals of 18cm long. Shopping list Here are the required components: Diatone ET 180 frame Eachine BG1306 3100KV motors ZTW Spider 12A Opto ESC with SimonK firmware Flip32 10DOF flight control board Lion…
Exactly 4 years after the announce of the first Raspberry, today the Raspberry foundation unleashed the new Raspberry Pi 3: Its main features are: [checklist] a new CPU (Broadcom BCM2837, 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53) WiFI (802.11n) and Bluetooth 4.1 onboard (at least! ;)) complete compatibility with the previous Raspberry 1 and 2 [/checklist] The new Raspberry is already available from…
If you read some of my latest projects (for example Home automation with Telegram BOT) you probably noticed that I really like the node.js javascript runtime. The framework is frequently updated (the moment I’m writing the latest version is 4.3.1) but if you use a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian you may have found that the official packages are quite outdated. For example, if…
Today I received from Elecrow the PCB for my Nixie thermometer: Here are two photos of the top and bottom sides: First, I soldered the female connectors for the Arduino and the power supply module on the bottom side; then I soldered the sockets, the resistors and the 5V voltage regulator on the top side: Before going further,…
After having verified that everthing is ok (electronic prototype and sketch) it’s now time to develop the PCB for my Nixie thermometer. I opened Eagle and drew the schematics: I then started to design the PCB. The request was that it should have been round and as small as possible. Therefore I decided to place the components on both sides,…
Today I completed the prototype of my Nixie thermometer. First, I put some heat-shrink tubing around each RGB led, to be sure that the light is emitted only upward and that the tubes are illuminated through the holes in the PCBs: Then I wrote a sketch that includes all the previous examples, including the cycling…
My thermometer will have RGB leds beneath every nixie tube, to be able to light them up with different colors. I decided to use pre-built modules, which include the RGB led and also all the required components (resistors…): Within the led package, there’s a WS2812 (datasheet) control chip, which offers 16M of colors, 256 levels of brightness and…
Today I wrote a sketch that merges the previous ones: reads the temperature from a thermistor (connected to PIN A0) and displays it driving two nixie tubes. I also added a third nixie, to display symbol °C. This tube is not controlled by Arduino but it’s directly connected to the power supply (and therefore it’s always on): The sketch is…
With an official press release, yesterday Microchip announced that has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Atmel. The overall value of the operation is 3.56 billion dollars. It’s for sure a news that will impact all the makers ecosystem. In the past the most common choice for hobbists and professionals was indeed the use of PIC microcontrollers; now Atmel,…