Posts

Overview I’ve been adding various “smart” devices to my home to control with automation via home assistant. Initially this was just dimmable and hue adjustable lighting, and then WiFi enabled switches to connect up the physical switch plates around the house as inputs into home assistant. And now I also have solar and power monitoring connected up into home assistant too. I’ve wanted to add control and monitoring of my reverse cycle air conditioner into home assistant too. This would enable a skew of extra features that the default control panel and interface lack. ...

Introduction Shortly after completing the d20, I revised and fixed the panels so that they could be assembled without requiring the extensive rework to fix the swapped Gate/Source connections. You can find the updated files here: https://github.com/gregdavill/d20-hardware/tree/main/pcb/led-panels/d20_tri_r0.3 I’ve also released a r1.0 version, which is the same layout, but I’ve updated the SKiDL source for the design so that it correctly produces a BOM, I’ve also added some alternatives to the BOM. ...

Introduction I’ve been using an Allwinner S3 SoC for experiments with the FLIR Boson. The description from the website sums the device up nicely: S3 is a high cost-effective video encoding processor jointly developed by Zhuhai Allwinner Technology Co., Ltd. (“Allwinner”) and Sochip Technology Co., Ltd. (“Sochip”). Its built-in single-core ARM Cortex-A7 runs at 1.2GHz with 1Gbit DRAM (DDR3) , supporting numerous peripheral devices. The Chip package is 234 balls FBGA package, size 11mm x 11mm , suitable for various types of product development. — http://www.sochip.com.cn/s3/index.php?title=What_is_S3_%3F ...

Summary Texas Instruments has a range of 16 bit microcontrollers, the MSP430. To program these require what they call a Flash Emulation Tool (FET). Thankfully all their affordable development kits contain a small stripped down FET, known as the ezFET Lite. TI has open sourced this design and provide both the firmware and the schematics. I was given a tag-connect cable as a giveaway through the 43oh, MSP430 community forum. I decided to create a custom PCB to connect directly to the tag-connect cable. ...

I’d recently bought a new XPS13 7390 (non 2-in-1) laptop. I had bought the 8GB variant, how hard could it be to upgrade? ...