Receipts Printer Photo Booth

As soon as I finished my previous project, I knew I could improve it…
With pictures, of course ! And also take them on the fly, like in a photo booth…
Why use Haskell to generate pictures on the printer ? Just because Functors, Applicatives and Monads are obscurely cool… 🙂

Thermal Printer Remotely Controlled through an ESP32

Again one of these things that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, but never found the time to… having one of these little thermal printers that spit out your receipt at the till in a supermarket, and hack it to print little snippets of information like reminders or shopping lists, etc. …

Stepper motor bluetooth serial driver

First Test using an Arduino (clone) board

Above is the image of my very first attempt of driving this nice little bi-polar stepper motor (M35SP-11HPK) that I had salvaged from a broken Canon printer a while ago.

I have quickly put together a L293D H-bridge with an Arduino board and using the Stepper library was quite straight forward

For the impatient you can see a (probably boring) video right after the break…

SPOKA Night Light controlled from and Android Phone

You people must have been wondering “what the heck was going on” and why haven’t I posted anything for the last 3 months or so… keep reading and you’ll find out more !

Simple serial transceiver – Aurel RTX-MID

 

I’ve been looking for a simple and cheap wireless serial data solution for quite a while now…

No specific usage, but things like every time you integrate your Arduino into a project and then 2 days later you want to update the code and you have to dismount everything, or simply remote control a project or more generally just getting tired of “all the wires”…

Electronic Anti-roll system for tractor (or how to connect IOIO to a Basic Atom

“Tractor”, what tractor… ? That’s what you must be wondering right now, as I don’t often blog about tractors… especially full scale agricultural ones…

This is a slightly different post for me, in that it’s about some help I gave to 2 guys in Germany, working on a hydraulic anti-roll system for a tractor.
Wow… I never though I would be working on “revolutionising the agriculture” as they’ve put it… 🙂

Basic Atom Pro M40 - IOIO - and the ICONIA A500 Android tablet

Razor 9DOF IMU – I2C to Arduino

 

I2C bus "hijack" - glued with epoxy - one of them uses a via through whole, another is soldered on the back

This is obviously related to my endless post about the home made quadcopter…

But it’s a much more generic problem, so here I am, talking about it in a post of its own…

The default way of interacting with Sparkfun’s 9DOF Razor IMU , as per its documentation, is through its serial interface.

Lightweight software UART -> custom serial

Software UART to custom serial on an AtTiny45, and then going to the Peggy2 board

7 months ago, in the middle of the winter, it all started with this…

IR Remote (Syma s026) dedicated board – V2 – AtTiny45

IRcmdS026_AtTiny45_Final_Side1

Right, the previous post was about creating a dedicated board that can do 2 things:

1. read and decrypt the IR commands sent by the Syma s026 remote control
2. send them via a serial link (to the “central” MCU or elsewhere)

IR Remote (Syma s026) dedicated board

Syma s026 Remote IR protocol decryptor

I’ve talked in at least 1 other post about how to use the Infra Red remote control of a toy helicopter (Syma s026) for other projects : once the protocol reverse engineered, it’s very easy to program a micro controller to listen to it and I find it very useful to integrate this into any project that needs some wireless remote controlling.

It’s also quite cheap, all you need is an IR receiver and the microcontroller that you alreay use in the given project…

BUT, the more I used it the more I hit one problem : it uses far too much of the MCU ressources, because the remote keeps sending 29 bytes signals all the time and you have to try to intercep them all to check if anything has changed in the commands sent !