microcontroller on soldernerd

Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 26: Rev B Board ordered

Sat, 20 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I recently ordered my first PCB at dirtypcbs.com and the result was promising. So there was nothing stopping me from finalizing the Rev B of my standalone Ultrasonic Anemometer and ordering a protopack. I’ve placed the order a few days ago and expect the boards to arrive here in 2 to 3 weeks. This should be good news for all those of you who have been asking for kits and want to contribute to the further developement of this project. I’ll build up one or two boards as soon as they get here and do some testing. If everything works as planned I can order some more components and ship some kits soon after that.

Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 24: New Microcontroller and Software Controlled Gain

Sun, 26 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been almost three weeks since my last post and some further progress has been made. I’ve upgraded the microcontroller and can now control the gain of the second amplifier stage in software. But let’s look at the changes in some more detail.

Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 23: First successful measurements

Mon, 06 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post I was happy to report that I managed to get the USB interface to work. This interface has since proved to be extremely valuable in software development and testing. While the device is taking measurements you can look at the results (or intermediate results) at your PC in real time. You can even log large amounts of data to a .csv file and inspect the results in Excel.

Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 22: USB up and running

Sat, 28 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Last time I showed you the nice new hardware of the new standalone ultrasonic anemometer. But at that time I had hardly any software written for it so I couldn’t do much with its 32 bit microcontroller. So the last two or three weeks I spend lots of time writing code that I’d like to share with you today.

Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 21: Standalone Anemometer Hardware

Sat, 14 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Last time I went through the design of my new standalone anemometer. Now it’s time to build this thing and see if it works as planned.

After I fried a couple of chips on my driver circuit testing board due to a wrong chip in the power supply I was a bit more careful this time and built up the board step by step.

Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 20: Standalone Anemometer Design

Wed, 11 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Last time I outlined my reasons to ‘go digital’ by adding a powerful on-board microcontroller and designing a standalone wind meter.

In the weeks that followed that decision I tried to find a suitable microcontroller and to design a prototype. Today I’ll show you the result of that work.

Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 19: Testing the Analog Circuit

Tue, 26 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post I went through the design of the analog part of the ultrasonic anemometer. Today we will see how the circuit designed last time performs in practice.

Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 18: Analog Signal Processing

Tue, 19 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I’ve sucessfully tested the new driver ciruit for my ultrasonic anemometer. It performed even better than I expected and I will be happy to use it pretty much as it is.

Temperature Controlled Fan

Sat, 09 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’m currently mainly working on my new anemometer design but once in a while I get distracted. For example when my Keysight E3645A lab power supply was making so much noise that I could hardly concentrate. That’s when the idea of this fan controller was born.

Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 16: Testing the new driver circuit

Thu, 31 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Last time I’ve presented my new design for the ultrasonic anemometer driver circuit. So now it’s time to see how it performs. If you’re new to this project you might want to check out the overview page or at least my last post.

Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 15: A new attempt

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been about one and a half years since I started out with my ultrasonic anemometer project. Like others before me I had to notice that this a much more demanding project than it appears to be at first. After countless hours of development and testing I have built this Arduino shield. It worked but the reliability of the measurements was never what I had aimed for. The problem was mainly how to figure out the absolute phase of the received signal. So the measurements were always precise - but sometimes off by a full wavelength. Then I was more or less inactive for most of 2015, mainly due to personal reasons. So the project was kind of stuck but i kept (and keep) getting a lot of encouraging feedback from you folks. I came up with new circuit ideas and decided to pretty much start with an entirely new design and to re-think each and every design choice I had made back then.

PWM Dimmer for RGB LED

Sat, 05 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Finished RGB dimmer

In my last post I’ve described the design and construction of my LED dimmer project. This project here is similar but a bit more involved. It controls RGB LEDs so it can not only change the brightness but also the color of the light. Instead of a simple pot it used a pair of rotary encoders with push buttons. One controls the brightness, pushing its button turns the light on or off. The other changes the color, pushing its button toggles between color and white.

PWM Dimmer for LED Lighting

Fri, 19 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Finished LED dimmer

I have recently moved to a new apartment and was looking for a PWM dimmer to control some 12V LED strips. I thought that should be easy enough nowadays but it proved more difficult than I thought. All I found either didn’t meet my requirements, were uggly or expensive. So I decided to build my own, tailor-made to my needs.

Arduino MPPT Solar Charger Shield - Testing

Wed, 03 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

First tests are being performed on the Solar Charger Shield

In my last post I’ve introduced a proof-of-concept Arduino solar charger shield. I went through the hardware as well as the way it works - or at least is intended to work. It was prominently linked on dangerousprototypes.com as well as some other sites and got quite a bit of publicity as a result. Thank you all for sharing this post.

Arduino Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 11: Testing the new hardware

Sun, 30 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Today I’ll go through each part of my new Arduino shield to see if it performs as expected.

If you’re new to my Arduino-based ultrasonic wind meter project, you might want to click here for an overview: /projects/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer/

Arduino Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 9: A new hardware

Mon, 24 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

My first wind meter prototype is kind of working. The software will need improvement to make this wind meter into something really useful. But both hardware and software are basically functional and can be built up upon.

Arduino Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 8: More Software

Sat, 22 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post I talked about how to get the Arduino to output bursts of 40kHz pulses. Today I’ll go through the rest of the software so by the end of this post we’ll have a very rudimentary but working sketch for our ultrasonic wind meter.

Arduino Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 7: Basic software

Thu, 20 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Today I’ll tell you how I got started with my software. If you’re new to my blog you might want to click here for an overview over my arduino-based wind meter project: /projects/arduino-ultrasonic-anemometer/

Constant Current Dummy Load

Mon, 10 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is a constant current dummy load. It’s controlled by a PIC16F1936 microcontroller. As you can see, it’s equipped with a 4x16 character LCD display and, less obvious, a rotary encoder with push button. It accurately sets the desired current via a 16bit DAC and reads both current and input voltage with a single-channel 16bit ADC each. Temperature is measured by the microcontroller’s internal 10bit ADC.