Electronics hobby blog

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.

WeMos D1 mini is an ESP8266 based board that can be programmed with Arduino IDE. In this blog I will describe how to make a simple WiFi based server that is being powered by a Li-Po battery and shows temperature and humidity inside your browser window.

ESP8266 is Wi-Fi microchip which can be programmed just like a normal Arduino board. For that purpose some additional software needs to be installed inside the Arduino IDE.

Browsing though Chinese online webshops, I came across a DVB-T+DAB+FM USB dongle that claimed to be modded into a SDR (Software Defined Radio). The price was under 10 euros, so I decided to give it a try. After some tryouts I managed to get it working.

Blink LED is a Hello World! application for micro-controllers. If you manage to get it running, you can assume that you are all setup and ready for further developments on your board. In this blog item I will cover how to do that on a STM32F407 Discovery board.

After the inside of the mancave was finished it was time to create the power distribution / fuse box that connects all the power wires and lights.

An important thing for a man is to be able to retreat to his own space and do stuff inside it what one likes. Although I have an area on the attic it didn't give me the feeling of complete dominion, so I have decided to create a mancave inside the shed that was outside of the house.

A while back I have assembled this bench power supply kit, which I received as a gift from my friend Eric. The kit was published in a Dutch electronics forum (Circuits online) as PCB Lab voeding. It was time to create a casing for it as it was just lying around in my drawer and was not really being used.