I recently bought a new phone, because my old one’s battery capacity had degraded to the point where it couldn’t last me through the day – an experience that’s fairly common. The pain of financial expenditure fresh in my head, I decided to investigate what I could do to look after the battery of my […]
Read More A smart charger that preserves your phone batteryMy electronics workbench was missing one crucial component: a power supply. For years I’d got by as a broke student testing my projects with an assortment of DC adaptors, LiPos, AAs, small buck/boost converters and linear regulators. But enough was enough. I had been bitten by no current limit enough times: it was time to […]
Read More Making a DIY power supply from an old stereo ampI recently bought this fairly chunky buck converter from China, manufactured by a company called Yeeco. Despite its price, it works well and the quality of manufacture is high. You can set voltage and a current limit on the “control panel”, and you get some CV/CC lights too – it tries to behave like a […]
Read More Secret UART On Cheap DCDC convertersThis is a project that I’ve had on the back-burner for a while, but recently got around to finishing. It still needs some tuning but it’s getting there. Since I wanted to be able to control it from my phone, it uses a Raspberry Pi Zero W to handle WiFi communications. For a cheap, easily […]
Read More Balancing robotDue to a friend moving away (Finnian Anderson, check out his blog) I came into ownership of a Skywriter. I decided to hook it up to an Arduino Leonardo to create a gesture/shortcut pad for my computer. The skywriter can detect a number of gestures including flicks, circles and taps. I assigned each gesture to […]
Read More Computer gesture control with Arduino and skywriterMy latest project has been to build my own Quadcopter. I spent a while researching in late 2015, got some parts for Christmas, and have been building since. As you can see from the costings graph above, my main expense was the RC transmitter, as I decided to go for one that supports telemetry. For a […]
Read More QuadcopterRecently I was given an old CD player that wasn’t needed anymore. I decided to hack the electronics, and turn it into a clock (because what else would you turn an old CD player into?). I attached an LCD screen to the CD tray to display the time, and wired it up to an arduino. I had […]
Read More Clap ClockHere’s a video of the fully functioning chess board in action.
Read More IoT chessboard software integrationI recently undertook a month of work experience at Vitec, one half of which consisted of me shadowing engineers in their jobs and spending time in each department – mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, software, testing etc. The other half of the time, I was allowed to use the company’s resources to build a project of […]
Read More IoT Chess Board
Ben James 