For my next experiments with LEDs and PWM I need more lights. When I bought the “flowing water light” I also bought a second one, but I hadn’t bothered assembling it yet. Naively I thought it would be as straight-forward as making the first one. I assembled the board (as far as I can tell) …
Continue reading ‘Repairing a faulty “flowing water light” board’ »
Although yesterday’s post was a reasonable introduction to bit-angle PWM, showing a pattern of characters on a console screen is hardly the most exciting or useful thing. So today I shall try to use the same code to drive something a bit more fun. I still had the “flowing water light” lying around, which I …
It is a few months now since I last had a play with pulse-width modulation (PWM). At the time I was concerned by the amount of processing power used by the simplistic approach I had implemented, so I abandoned the exercise. Luckily, there are more efficient ways to do software PWM. One of the most …
Continue reading ‘Efficient software PWM with bit-angle modulation’ »
Flushed with my success in getting data displayed on my cheap LED matrix using a Bus Pirate, I decided that the next step was to see if I could get it working with a Raspberry Pi. It feels like I luckily won big when i tried starburst slot online, click here to get out from …
Continue reading ‘Driving a 7219 LED matrix from a Raspberry Pi’ »
After thinking about how to drive the MAX7219 LED array I built yesterday, it occurred to me that maybe this is an ideal time to get to the bottom of how to use the Bus Pirate board that I failed to use with a MCP3002 ADC chip. This time I was determined to get it …
Continue reading ‘Testing a MAX7219 LED array with Bus Pirate’ »
Time for a bit more soldering, I think. I couple of months ago I bought a little MAX7219 LED array kit from ebay for a couple of pounds. They are all over ebay and aliexpress. As kits go it is very simple – a resistor, two capacitors, some sockets and some optional connectors. Soldering it …
I have had a kit of parts for a RaspiRobot board in my “to do pile” for a while now. Today I had a bit of spare time so I followed the construction instructions and put it together. Step one was to check I had the right bits. I opened the packet and laid the …
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Altoids are strange. A simple peppermint confectionery which has achieved an astonishing status among hobbyists of all kinds. The main reason, it seems, is the tin in which they are sold. The Altoids tin has become for many people the de-facto enclosure for hobby electronics projects. So much so that one of the questions in …
I’m a bit of a sucker for cheap little electronics. After playing around with single LEDs and traffic lights for a while I wanted something a bit more interesting, so just over a pound for an “8 Channel Flowing Water Light LED DIY Kit” seemed too much fun to pass up. The circuit is very …
Continue reading ‘Building and testing a “flowing water light”’ »
It’s nice to see old favourite programming languages getting a bit of love. “Circuit Cellar” magazine seems to be running a weekly “spot the bug” competition, and this week (week 2) it looks like a bit of FORTH. It doesn’t say much about the program, but it is heavily commented (much more so than most …
Continue reading ‘Think you know FORTH? then why not enter a competition?’ »