Hello, World!
Welcome to my world. I am a software engineer by day, and I try to dabble with the physical world at night. This blog will focus on projects that I have worked on, or continue to work on. Sure there will be some Arduino, raspberry pi, esp32, etc. projects on here, but I hope you will be interested as I am beyond these well documented technologies to properly build the right solution for you.
My main interests are automation, data collection, making things move, and of course lighting. Some of the current projects I am working on, which will soon become posts when I actually get the time to write down my thoughts and reasoning behind it are:
- Building light show (yes, using the popular lightshow pi).
- Building my own LED strip (similar to NeoPixels)
- Building my own current sensor and watt meter leveraging the INA219 part
- Li-Ion Battery pack – DIY build yourself with protection from overcharge, discharge, short circuit, etc.
- Solar Charging using common charge controllers and then a custom built one
- Remote controlled (or voice controlled) blind system
What to Expect
There are so many more ideas that I want to get to. For each of these, sure there are breakout boards, etc that help you build solutions faster, and definitely not knocking those, but to truly understand what is going on and how the parts work independent of the magic breakout board provided, I find it’s almost necessary to design your own circuit with the parts you want. Sure, leverage the open source community and libraries (Adafruit documentation is very nice), but don’t just simply buy and assume you know what the part is. A lot of times a part is much more versatile than the circuit it is in the breakout board. So that’s the plan here. Dissect datasheets, truly understand the circuit and use the proper solution for your problem (which may very much include something already out of the box such as several breakout boards).