Electronics hobby blog

In order to connect your DE10-Nano board to VGA or other RGB output, you need an I/O Board. This PCB board and assembly instructions are available on the GitHub pages of the MiSTer project.

Getting FPGA cores of your favourite retro systems onto the DE10-Nano is very easy. You can run them in matter of minutes.

The Terasic DE10-Nano board is based on Altera Cyclone V SoC chip. It is a hybrid of ARM processor and FPGA that lets you do amazing things, among which is run cores of vintage computers. But as always it is good to start with making a LED on the board blink.

In this blog I will show how to connect a 0.96" IPS color display that is 80x160 pixels to Arduino Nano. Then I will try the new Arduino Web Editor to create and later to share this project.

Raspberry Pi is an ideal device to setup a complete stack of software that is needed to run a home automation system. In this blog I will cover installation and configuration of Raspberry Pi Server with MQTT broker, in combination with Sonoffs running Tasmota firmware.

Sonoff is an ESP8266 based on/off switch that will let you control electrical devices around your home. Out of the box it can be only managed by the eWeLink app which is running on Chinese servers. If you want to take full control of the device you can flash the firmware and access it inside your local network.

Fast Fourier transform (FFT) is an analysis method that let's you dissect complex waveforms and determine out of which frequencies they were composed. This function is often present on an oscilloscope and in this blog I will show a basic application of it.

Electrolytic capacitors are known for their terrible accuracy. Just by reading the value on the package is often not enough to know their true capacitance. In this blog I will show how to measure the real value by using a scope.

If you want to save your valuable space and don’t want to put a real Xmas tree in your room, there is always an option to make one out of PCB and LEDs and during the process learn something about electronics.

In addition to the WeMos battery powered temperature server, it would be nice to know what the remaining level of the battery is, so we can recharge it in time. This is easily done using a voltage divider circuit and the analog input on the WeMos D1 mini module.