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Programmable LED Dimmer

Sun, 30 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Around one and a half years ago I’ve designed and built various LED dimmers for both white and RGB LEDs. Then late last year someone approached me asking if I could make an RGB dimmer for him, too. But my designs were really tailored to their specific applications and built with home-made, i.e. milled PCBs which are time-consuming to make. So I decided to make a more universal version based on a proper, etched board which could be built in a small series and used for all kind of applications, both white and RGB. The result is this versatile, programmable 4-channel dimmer.

MPPT Solar Charger Testing

Wed, 28 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In a previous post I have presented a design for an MPPT Solar Charger. In the mean time I have built a prototype and also wrote some software for it. So today I’ll go through my findings of what works well and what needs to be improved. And yes, there are some flaws in the design…

Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 28: New hardware tested

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I last time proudly presented the new RevB board and got a lot of feedback from people who want one, too. As mentioned I have all the components here to ship up to 10 kits but I was reluctant to send anything until I had the chance to do some hardware testing. Not much had changed since the last revision but I don’t like taking chances on things like this.

Ultrasonic Anemometer Part 25: I2C Interfacing and more

Thu, 11 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a long six weeks since my last post but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t done anything since. Among other things, I wrote some code to get the I2C interface working and hooked the anemometer up to an Arduino Uno with an LCD display attached. Apart from demonstrating the I2C interface this also nice for testing. For the first time I can see what this thing is measuring in real time without hooking it up to a PC over USB.

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 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.

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.

Stand-alone Incuctance Meter Finished

Thu, 22 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve read my last post you’re already familiar with my Inductance Meter project: /posts/stand-alone-inductance-meter/. At that time the hardware was ready but there was no software yet. That’s been corrected, the inductance meter is now fully functional.

Stand-alone Inductance Meter

Tue, 13 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Some of you may have seen my arduino-based inductance meter in this post: /posts/arduino-based-inductance-meter/. The guys at dangerousprototypes.com picked it up (http://dangerousprototypes.com/2014/12/16/arduino-based-inductance-meter/) and this blog got more visitors than I could ever have imagined. Thanks, dangerousprototypes.

Programming sockets for PIC microcontrollers

Tue, 11 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I regularly use PIC microcontrollers. I’ve tried some Atmel chips lately but I’m still by far most familiar with the PIC16 & PIC18 chip families. As you can see in my other posts, I tend to use SMD components but once in a while I need to program a DIP package.