Electronics

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.

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.

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.