This is not my lab !
I’m starting a project with a couple of friends and today they ask me : “if we want to duplicate your lab to parallelize the hardware stuff, what to we need?” That was an interesting question I want to share in this post. So I’m going to list all the stuff I’m using frequently with its price for my home hacking.
All that stuff is low end material but affordable !
ATtiny45 and ATtiny85 are small Atmel micro-controleur like the 328p with less legs and smaller price. They can be nice platform for really small system does not requiring a lot of I/Os.
You can install Arduino on this device really easily. I won’t describe how to do because this excellent tutorial contains all what we need.
Ixys solar panel
I’m looking at solar energy to power IoT device that will be used in a car. I did not found a lot of documentation on what we can do with solar panel and what kind of energy we can expect to get with a such system.
This post will summarize the information I got on solar panels and measures done.
In the Telecom Design SDK, you have a cflash tool you can use to reflash your firmware from a serial port. This can be usefull to reflash a TD chip from another chip of from an embedded platform like a RaspberryPI.
This peace of code is not really nicely documented, so to avoid spending to many tries, here is the result of my investigations
Raspberry PI Shiel Hat standard
When you want to design a shield for Raspberry Pi, you have to follow the HAT standard. This standards describes the form factor of the shield to ensure future compatibility. It also describes the configuration solution for the board based on a flash containing necessary information. The Hat standard link gives all the detailed specification to design a such shield. In this post I’ll describe my experience of designing such shield and you will find the basic elements I build and now sharing with you.
esp8266 wifi for arduino
The ESP8266 is a simple standalone addon for any board that works fine with Arduino and only cost less than 4€ on ebay.
It can operate as a device or an AP can gives wireless network connectivity to your application. It is interfaced with Arduino based on a serial line. The only problem of a such thing ( as for most of wifi chip ) is the power consumption. It requires about 150mA to run ; a lot for batteries.
My Friend @couac made a really good post on how to make it working with a Yabas, basically any Arduino board, I recommand the reading of his post : william post on ESP8266
For RF signal you must draw a 50 ohm net between chip and antenna to get the best performance.This post is the result of my web research on this topic …
There are two ways to design your emitter to antenna solution:
microstrip line
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The way to get a 50 ohm communication way is different depending on your choice.
BAKU 702B Soldering Station
I wrote a post about the baku 702B 6 month ago with my initial feedback after receiving it.
After 6 months, my feedback is good and the station works well. I just made 45 raspberry shields with it using the air flow and the soldering iron and it make the job.
Now it is time to change the soldering iron head. For sure its life has been short compare to my previous one from another brand. My fear was to find a compatible head as I saw none of them with the 702B reference.
The solution is to search for 936 – 937 station or Tip 900M, they all are the same and works well with the Baku 702B. Go on ebay and pay 1/2€ each ; you will also find different head type. I recommend to order some right after buying the station as they are coming from china (generally) and your need 2-3 week to get them.