Electric Long-board

When this year’s lock-down started a few months ago, I finally bought myself a long-board so that I could keep up with the kids on their bikes or scooters when exercising.
It didn’t take long before I remembered that I always wanted to build an electric "toy" that could carry myself.
I contemplated a bike, a Go Kart and others, but it’s always been pretty obvious that the easiest to attempt would be a skateboard…

ESP8266 Temperature Logger

This is a quick post about a pretty standard Temperature (and Humidity) data logger. Yes, I’m finally jumping on the IOT bandwagon, whatever that is… 🙂

The background for this is my recent discovery that the adrenaline (epinephrine) injections that a person at risk of anaphylaxis has to carry around should normally be stored within a very tight temperature range (20-25°C with short exposures to 15-30ºC tolerated).

This came as a big surprise, especially in the context of going on a skiing holiday, so I decided to do something to at least have an idea of the temperature range that these injections experience, before going any further and thinking about how to store them better.

Custom Remote WiFi Mains Socket Switch

Here’s again one of these small hacks that I’ve been wanting to do for a while but never found the time…

There’s actually not that much to it, the most interesting part is probably just being amazed at how easy it is nowadays to pull off this kind of hack…

Electronic Art

 

I had been wanting to do this for such a long time…

Self Balancing Robot – V3

Same as the previous post, this is an old project that still doesn’t work properly, but will probably never have the time to fix, so I’ve decided to post the details here, in case I need to refer to them later.

Self Balancing Robot – V2

This is a quick post to dump some pictures and lessons learneth the hard way, when I tried to build a nicer / better self balancing robot.

All this dates back from October 2014, so more than 1 year ago, but I finally gave up on trying to make this work and wanted to keep all this info/details for my own reference.

Arduino, when the Servo library is not good enough…

 

I went back to try and finish this ball balancing project, but after some improvements I started to get frustrated by the fact that the servos kept being “jittery”.

Time for my new and shiny servo tester I thought… ! It turned out I was seeing the same problem.

Ball Balancing

 

I know it’s been a while since my last post, but 2 kids and a new job take their toll 🙂

Most importantly, for this past few months, I’ve been thinking of a way to say “thank you” to my former colleagues that somehow managed to offer me the absolute best leaving present: a Meccano kit and a prepaid Maplin card (this is the equivalent of the now defunct Radioshack, for my U.S. readers) !

Ex fellow markiteers, this post is for you, thank you for your present and more importantly thank you for having been such nice colleagues for almost 9 years !

Optical Wheel Encoder from Infrared Printer Sensor

Quick post about some intermediary work I had to do while working on my new Self Balancing robot.

Once the basics were done and the robot was balancing, I realised that it seemed unstable as it wasn’t staying in place…

The easiest way to deal with this would be an optical encoder for the wheels, that would tell me how much each moves.

Optical sensor mounted

Self balancing robot

It’s really been a very long time since I added this on my todo list, and in the past couple of week-ends I finally found the time to do it.