This week I have received the new PCBs for the MCU-Link MR for drones and robots and have populated the parts on the PCB, and it works fine as UART bridge and debug probe for the PixHawk i.MX RT:
I have been running out of business cards, so I have created custom wood cards with RFID chip integrated:
This blog usually features Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs), but my other passion are Personalized Cutting Boards :-).
It has been a while since my last CNC or laser cutter post, so I thought I showcase just quickly one of the recent designs.
I’m in the final stage of finishing a electrical vehicle (EV) charger controller, which optimizes battery loading using the available PV system: use as much as possible the solar energy and not the grid.
While the controller talks with an Modbus (RS-485) interface to the vehicle charger itself (see Controlling an EV Charger with Modbus RTU), it uses MQTT over WiFi to get information about the available solar energy from HomeAssistant and the Powerwall.
Continue readingIt is already December 1st, and time for a new Advent Calendar. This year the design includes birch plywood with PMMA, SK6812 RGBW LEDs running with a Raspberry Pi Pico board, building a small village.
Switzerland got a snow cover, with more snow coming the next days. December started, and so did the Advent season. Similar to last year, we wanted to create a special advent calendar, which is then is given to families in the neighborhood who deserve it, because they did so much for our community this year.
Last year it was a special house created mostly with a laser cutter. This year I took advantage of having a desktop CNC down in the basement. The result is a ‘tree’ filled with small boxes made of oak wood:
It is always great to see if someone is picking up my work and produces something even better :-). In this case, Gerhard Székely took my DIY Portable Video Conference, Sharing and Teaching Device and created an awesome version of it:
Camera to the front
As promised I’m going to share more details about the “60 Billion Lights” project. It is about a project to build a piece of electronics behind a 100×50 cm canvas to show animations or to display information like temperature, humidity, weather, time or just any arbitrary text.
Writing text
Human since 1982 claims
“Human since 1982 have the copyright to works displaying digital time using a grid arrangement of analog clocks…”
I’m not a lawyer, but without obligations (imho) I have removed the content.
You can read more of the details here: Copyright Law for Makers and Educators
Thanks for understanding,
Erich
I really love clocks. I think this is I am living here in Switzerland. Beside of that: clock projects are just fun :-). After I have completed a single clock using stepper motors (see “DIY Stepper Motor Clock with NXP LPC845-BRK“), I wanted to build a special one which is able to show up to four different time zones: Below an example with London (UK), New York (USA), Beijing (China) and Lucerne (Switzerland):
Stepper Clock
MCU on Eclipse 