I’d order online if there was a LiFePO4 charger on the market. However, in my country I’ve been unable to find one, and importing (excise & duties, paperwork) is more work than building it myself. I’ll also likely need a design that I can cheaply include on custom PCBs for manufacture (not for sale to end-users, but for internal use by maintenance technicians).
I gave it a test on a cell today and it seems to charge fine and at a reasonable rate – but in a sudden flash of brilliance, I forgot to physically connect the ADC pin to the battery, so it couldn’t shut off. Well, that’s what testing is for I guess.
Anyway after fixing this, it looks like I can call this a win and move on. If it undergoes destructive optimization, I’ll report back here with a warning to others.
However this is not a lithium polymer battery, and as it’s a 32700, it is not a prismatic or pouch cell either. It is a lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) cylindrical battery in metal housing. Battery University does have them listed in their table of chemistries (in case you’re curious), but they don’t seem to have much detailed information. Enough to build a charger though :)
Anyway, thanks for your reference in any case! I’m not responding to criticize you, only to improve the utility of this conversation in case someone else finds it on search :)
An international parts order is too complex for such a small thing. I’m not in the USA or China. So no TP5000 for me, got to work with what I have.
I agree, no charging at 4.2 volts. The current charger I built seems to work well enough. I ran some tests and it charges within spec. The reason I turn off the charger to measure cell voltage is because otherwise I’ll mainly be measuring SMPS noise.
Anyway it beats the charger available in the local market, which is clearly unsafe, no matter how much they assure me that it’s ‘totally OK’.
To all the electronic nerds out there: I am trying to trigger a 555 timer by movement in a random direction that also occurs randomly and any change in position should trigger the 555. AFAIK tilt switches are not useable here. Does this idea make sense?...
If that’s not sensitive enough, another option is using a piezo element coupled to the case to detect vibration, with an op-amp or hex inverter to buffer + trigger the 555. However if you couple it too closely with e.g. the floor or furniture it will pick up nearby footsteps or cars. Might be good depending on the situation.
Im building a flashlight and i want to test if a fan in it would be a good idea but the flashlight is really small so i would need a motor thats smaller than 1 cm preferably. I found really good ones at maxon group but unless you order them in bulk(1000+ units) they cost like 400€. So do yall know anywhere i could find them?...
In seconds? Wow. I think you’re right, you might need more than a small fan!
It might be worth exploring heat pipes or peltier effect coolers. The latter makes the problem worse (they are inefficient and generate a lot of heat) but your LED can be locally cooler if you can e.g. move all that extra heat into a big heatsink (also condensation can be problematic).
One cheap source of heat pipes for testing could be old graphics cards – they often outperform simple copper heat sinks. Use thermal epoxy to stick your LED to it and see if the performance is acceptable. On the exotic end of things, you could also water/oil cool it, or (carefully) make your own thermal grease from industrial diamond powder for a small boost in thermal conductivity.
Also even at 95% efficiency, it sounds like your boost converter has some heat to dump too!
Hm, that reminds me! If you’re designing your own PCB, some manufacturers will make the PCB out of aluminum for you instead of FR4. This is commonly used for high-intensity LED lights to help keep them cool.
Here’s some random info about them so you can see what I mean:
Hello y’all! I’ve always been interested in computers and programming for as long as i can remember, but recently i’ve decided to try to get into some of the deeper stuff behind that, into the wonderful world of electronics. Where should I start? What courses or books or youtube series should I consume? What are some...
The most important thing is to tackle projects frequently and get yourself involved with other people doing the same. Learn by doing! I found books, videos, and so on of limited utility by comparison. I’ll include an unreasonable quantity of my notes below.
Some useful resources:
Learning Python – a decent programming language to start with since it’s flexible and enforces some good habits : python.swaroopch.com
Websites with details on other people’s cool projects: hackaday.com
You should also learn C / C++ (unless you are an assembly-language degenerate like me)
KiCAD is fantastic these days (and free!): www.kicad.org
I’ll point out that Microchip Studio is awful and buggy but for some microcontrollers you’re stuck with it. Everyone working with embedded systems gets stuck with some lousy manufacturer-supplied software sometimes.
List of initial things to learn:
How to read component datasheets (you will be doing this a lot). Actually I think a lot of my electronics knowledge was picked up from just absorbing datasheets like a weird sponge of some sort.
How to order from Mouser / Digikey / RS Components / Arrow / McMaster (these are also a great source of datasheets)
Basic laws of electricity and magnetism (any freshman university physics textbook is OK – these pop up used all the time, and even an old one is OK). Just do all the problems in each chapter and you’ll be fine. Or you can tackle “The Art of Electronics” if you like.
Soldering is actually pretty easy, just buy some resistors and some prototyping board and get some practice in. You’ll need to learn surface mount soldering to get access to good and cheap parts later on, but thankfully, it is way easier than it looks. Like, really a lot easier than people make it look.
How to order manufactured circuit boards from a factory using a design in KiCAD (this is actually pretty easy and cheap!)
These days, a lot of components can be purchased on pre-built ‘modules’ that fufill a certain objective. For example, a temperator sensing module might have a sensor and all the supporting components on a little board, so you just connect power+ground and data. These are made specifically with learning in mind and are made in Asia at a very reasonable price – do note though that reading the actual datasheet of the parts in question will give you much deeper knowledge over time.
Tools to buy:
A soldering station. Some people suggest fancy expensive stuff, but frankly, some brands of Chinese tools have gotten quite good. Yihua is a good and affordable brand of soldering station. You can get a soldering-iron-only version if you need to save money, but I’d recommend a model that also includes a hot air rework tool. This makes fixing mistakes on boards way easier, lets you salvage components more easily from junk and failed projects, and also adds a lot of flexibility later on.
A multimeter / parts tester. Should measure voltage, current, capacitance, resistance and diodes. Pro’s Kit is an OK brand from Asia.
Eventually you will need an oscilloscope, but not at the start. Hantek, Rigol, and Unit-T make good entry level ones. Siglent is midrange. Tektronix is for rich kids. An old used scope is fine but often shipping is expensive if it’s one of the heavy ones.
Tweezers, wire cutters and strippers. Lots of protoboard and solder.
If you’re really into low-level microcontroller stuff, an AVR-ICE will be pretty cool to have a few years down the line :)
Platforms and Communities to Consider:
Arduino – largest friendliest community with the most tutorials, but as such has a ton of beginners and students looking to copy/paste code without understanding. So sometimes it’s hard to find someone knowledgeable, and if you do, they might be sort of exhausted. It’s probably the best place to start these days overall.
AVR Freaks – the opposite of Arduino. Hostile, but super knowledgeable. I’ve learned so much by searching their forums, I’ve never needed to ask a question! They are great too, but really not a place for beginners to ask questions. It is a good forum to read if you want to learn assembly / C for microcontrollers, but has a steep learning curve – I’d save it for later :D
Raspberry Pi – makes everything super easy, generally at the cost of being horribly inefficient and somewhat expensive. It can be a good place to start, but be careful not to learn bad habits here – e.g. using a whole computer system with Linux to blink an LED. You’ll end up having to unlearn a lot to make reasonable battery-powered devices later on. Awesome where processing power is actually needed – machine vision, some robotics, and AI. The raspberry Pi Pico has fewer of these problems (and you can code in Python!) – it’s pretty fantastic and I would personally choose it as my first microcontroller.
Other Stuff:
Avoid playing with mains power / high voltage until you know what you are doing.
Avoid selling things until you know what FCC / CE is. You can teach courses on what you’ve learned to fund your studies though! I bootstrapped this way.
Lithium batteries can be sort of tricky / hazardous. When starting out with them, use the metal cylindrical cells at first. The TP4056 is an OK charge controller to use, and pre-built modules are like a dollar in bulk.
I own a prototyping company in Asia, this introduces some bias on my tool recommendations: low cost, high value – but only ‘good enough’ performance and convenience. I also hate solderless breadboards and consider them more trouble than they are worth – some people disagree with me and they are also correct. I also find surface-mount soldering way easier and more reliable than through-hole (most people disagree with me but it’s worth thinking about). Finally, I’m a 700 year old Taoist immortal that still uses a slide rule and writes poetry in Assembly language. So I’m part of an older engineering tradition and it’s worth keeping that in mind when weighing my advice.
There are a lot of differences, but I’ll try and go over the high level ones. The RP2040 is a chip, and the others are boards – so I’ll compare the chips on them.
The RP2040 chip is really powerful overall, and does some odd things with I/O that let you do a bunch of very fast, precise things. You also get a lot of I/O pins and they are very well-behaved. The main advantage though is that it works well in both Python and C++, and is well-supported.
The ESP32 based board (Thing Plus) has integrated WiFi. The ESP32 is a great chip, I use it a lot, but it has some unfortunate quirks. First, it has a very high clock speed and decent memory, making it quite powerful. However, if you glitch out the network stack via your code, it can have some problems with unexpected resets. This was much worse with the earlier-generation ESP8266. Secondly, the I/O work much more slowly than the system clock (if I recall correctly), and they are picky about what state they have on startup – some go high as part of the boot process, others must be high or low on boot but can be used after. This is actually quite a pain sometimes. It’s a great chip overall though and works well in C++.
The Pro Micro uses an ATMEGA32 chip. I’m a huge AVR fan so I don’t have many bad things to say, I like it a lot. It is much slower than the other two chips though, and has less memory. Probably it’s best to use C++, but you ought to be able to use Assembly too if you like. The I/O on AVRs are really well-behaved and usually operate at the same speed as the chip, which is nice when you need precise timing! The best thing about it though, is it can use much less power than the other two options, if you use the sleep modes right. So you can build neat battery-powered applications. Finally AVRs have excellent datasheets – there’s rarely any ambiguity on exactly how any system on the chip works.
Overall, I’d choose an RP2040 board if I wanted to use Python and do IoT/Robots/whatever (you can buy boards with or without WiFi), an ESP32 based board if I wanted to do IoT stuff in C++, and the Pro Micro if I wanted to do low-level, low power embedded stuff in C++ or assembly (and maybe branch out into other AVR chips). The C++ options mean you can use the Arduino IDE and their libraries.
Besides the I/O and supporting hardware, the clock speed is wildly different between these 3 chips – that’s worth considering. By that metric, the ATMEGA based designs are the slowest by far – although somewhat faster than you’d estimate since they usually operate 1 instruction per clock cycle, whereas the other chips are a few clock cycles per instruction (they are still way faster than the ATMEGA line though).
Regarding pre-made boards vs. your own? I think there are three things to consider:
Pre-made boards are awesome for prototyping. Making sure the damn thing will work (feature-complete) before designing your own board is a good idea. Then, make your first board with all features added in (this is important), but expect to iterate at least once (make revisions and order boards a second time). There’s no such thing as premature optimization in hardware design – it’s not like software where you can just design the core of an application and then build features as you go. This is why always designing prototypes to be feature-complete is a good workflow, and generic development boards are a good starting point for this.
Designing your own board is really easy for AVRs. I do this all the time, lately with the Attiny10. Honestly there are a ton of AVR chips out there, and not all of them have affordable / popular development boards, so often it’s worth making your own for use in item 1 above (…really you just need at minimum power and a header to break out the pins for ISP programming). Then when you want to make your final widget, you just expand your development board design, which lets you make a really miniaturized and streamlined thing! You will need an ISP programmer though, like the AVR-ICE (which has a nasty but minor bug in the design – ping me before buying one and I’ll save you 2 days of headaches setting up).
A neat trick is to design your own boards and still use a dev board (so making your own boards and buying premade dev boards are not mutually exclusive options). This is especially useful with the Pi Pico and ESP32 (where making a dev board is less beginner-friendly) – a cheatcode is “castellated mounting holes”. These let you solder (for example) a Pi Pico dev board directly to your own design as a surface-mount component. You can do this by just adding a socket and using header pins too, but SMT + castellated mounting holes lets you keep the design small and reliable.
BTW when designing your own boards, committing to SMT parts (where possible) early on is one of the things I’m really glad I did. You don’t need much tooling to do it. Just a solder paste syringe, a toothpick or pin, some tweezers, and a hot air rework station (included in some soldering stations). Even 0402 parts (about the size of two grains of salt) are pretty easy to do by hand. It’s amazing the level of miniaturization that you can achieve these days this way, as a private individual with a very modest budget!
Finally, the Arduino products are generally very good dev boards, whether or not you’re using the Arduino IDE (you can still program them ASM or non-Arduino C++). So for any chip that an Arduino exists for, it’s an excellent starting point – although you may want to design your own board one day to remove unnecessary stuff if it comes out cheaper and you go through a lot of them, or just for the experience.
Disclaimer: this is not specifically for a commercial product, but various things I design sometimes get commercialized. I mention this so that you may decide whether you want to weigh in. If it’s commercialized, I will probably make very little money but a bunch of university students may get a neat STEM program in the...
They’re university software engineering students, probably a year or two into their degrees. I’m hoping to provide the robots as completed units that are controlled via API, because we’re not likely to get many students with electrical, mechanical, or embedded backgrounds. You’re right about the complexity though, and that’s something I’ve been thinking about – I guess I’ll start out with a bit of optimism regarding their talents, and scale back if needed :D
I don’t really have a scope, budget, timeline, or audience properly defined for this project – in short my client has a STEM program for building and interacting with digital maps, but it’s way too boring and I’m determined to breathe some life into it. So I’m going to have to play a lot of things by ear.
Haha, I know exactly what you mean – I’m most interested in resource-constrained embedded systems. I like the attiny10 a lot. At work I mostly write Python, but in my own time it’s mostly assembly language. It feels more concrete, every decision matters, and anything that goes wrong is 100% your fault as there are relatively few bugs at that level. It’s a lot of fun. Also the datasheet is very good.
I’m self-taught with all the electronics stuff, I paid for it by teaching a course on whatever thing I did most recently. Then I’d use the proceeds to buy tools and parts for the next big (often dumb) idea. I’d also ask for the software engineering assignments from colleagues in those programs, and complete them in my spare time. It was puzzling to a few people why I would want to do assignments, and indeed some were very boring (oh god Java + Spring framework) but others were quite interesting (formal study of algorithms). Sadly, economic reality kicked in and I had to run a company instead of pursuing my education further (I still try to do one ridiculous engineering thing per year though).
I guess there’s a real risk (…like 100%) that I overestimate the motivation students have – so I think I’m going to take your advice and set the level of abstraction with something API-like to abstract away the low-level components (this is closer to my client’s domain). I’m imagining a robot that acts as a WiFi access point, and having something “like an API” that works over UDP packets that describe high-level functions. Then start with something simple – like a digital map with known starting location, and a small obstacle course that can be completed with simple distance measurement, no point clouds. If that goes well, I can develop towards more complex material – probably not full SLAM, but maybe localization on a pre-mapped surface. I have plenty of my own code as examples of how to do simple UDP communications in Python, I could expand it into a custom library.
Sort of like Logo from 1983, but with a physical robot and sensors. I’m a little to young to have used Logo, but the computer lab in my school was really outdated so I got to try it once :D
I’ve also messed around with the ESP8266 and various models of ESP32. Their WiFi time-of-flight stuff is interesting. I’ve quite a few projects with both actually! My main complaint is that the GPIO don’t behave nicely (also the esp8266 is a power hog and reboots if you screw up the network stack). They are much slower than I’d expect, and have weird states on boot. It’s not too bad to work around this stuff, but I chose the Pi Pico W so as not to have to explain it.
It still blows me away that I can easily do public-private key encryption on the ESP32. And graphics. At the same time!
Hello! What would be a good way to learn about electronics in terms of creating them? I’m particularly interested in building my own keyboards and other PC peripherals, but I’m not sure what tools I would need, or what’s a good knowledge base if I run into any issues. Any tips and or suggestions?
Well, you could say that there are three branches of electronics: analog, digital, and discrete (sort of between the previous two). For your goals, you mainly need to learn about digital systems.
What you’ll mainly be dealing with in terms of digital systems are microcontrollers and other embedded systems. I’d say the main two places to get started with those are the Arduino and Raspberry Pi ecosystems. The first is “more pure microcontroller” and the second is “more advanced embedded systems”.
Microcontrollers are mostly programmed in C++ these days (with a few strange people like me using Assembly), and the Arduino ecosystem sort of teaches that. Microcontrollers are usually the most efficient system to make the control electronics for something like a keyboard. Sparkfun and Adafruit are good companies to buy parts to get started from.
Embedded systems like the Raspberry Pi stuff can often run a whole operating system. This is too expensive (power, space, and $) for most keyboard builds, but you may want to learn how to use them for other projects. However, they also make a microcontroller (the Pi Pico) which would be OK and can be programmed in Python.
For advanced computer peripherals, you might need to learn FPGAs. However, that can be a difficult topic to get into by comparison. So maybe leave that for later.
A good way to get started is to buy the parts for, and build, a few Arduino projects. There are specific libraries for making Arduinos emulate a PC keyboard too.
In terms of tools, at first you will just need a breadboard, some resistors, LEDs and jumper wires. Maybe a battery or USB power supply. A multimeter too.
Soon after you will probably want to learn to solder to start making your own standalone devices. You should get a soldering station with temperature control – some people swear by Hakko, myself I have a cheap-but-good Yihua soldering + hot air rework station.
Next, while Sparkfun and Adafruit are great businesses, they are not cost-effective ways to source a lot of parts. You’ll want to learn how to use the part search and ordering functions on Digikey, Mouser, Arrow, and RS Components. Maybe also McMaster-Carr if you do mechanical stuff.
When you have some working designs done, you will probably want to learn KiCAD. It’s software for designing circuits, and laying out printed circuit boards (PCBs) to send to a factory to be made professionally. Through the magic of globalization, this is actually pretty affordable! A typical run costs me 20-40$ for 10 units, and takes 16 business days – although I live in Asia, so it might cost a little more from the USA or Europe.
You’ll also maybe want to learn 3D modelling and printing, for designing cases (I struggle with this more than I’d like to admit). TinkerCAD is an OK place to get started, although tools like SolidWorks are certainly more advanced. You don’t need to buy a 3D printer unless you want to – you can just order your designs made online.
Anyway, the results with KiCAD + 3D printing can be really quite good and can last many years of use. They also let you share your design with others, so other people can make it!
Finally, if there’s a hackerspace / makerspace in your area, these are great communities of people you can learn from. Definitely check them out. They may have a 3D printer you can use, as well as other tools. Often they teach courses too.
One small note – getting from “hey neat this works!” to making and selling a product is (sadly) a really big step. So if you one day want to do that, build a network and ask for advice from someone who has gone through it first.
Glad to help! I find it quite neat that with effort and time, it’s possible to learn to make quite advanced electronic systems yourself at home. Some of the stuff the more advanced hobbyists make is quite a bit better than a lot of mass-produced goods. We truly live in an age of wonders!
Serious question from a beginner in electronics. For reasons I do not fully understand, I have become fixated on the idea of collecting small amounts of electricity from “interesting” sources. I don’t mean “free energy”, instead, I mean things like extracting a few mV from being so close to a AM radio tower using two...
It’s a fun engineering challenge. Weird energy harvesting tech mostly has applications for sensor networks. Some of the new generation of bluetooth chips have ridiculously low power consumption – so being able to deploy them without a battery somewhere without maintenance is occasionally useful.
Some currently used technology are piezo energy harvesting from mechanical vibration, low-light solar, and thermocouples.
My approach is usually to think around the TPL5110 and a pseudocapacitor. The TPL5110 is a timer that has a current consumption of 35 nA and can operate down to 1.8V. Every 2 hours, it would activate an ATtiny10 that can operate in the microampere range. That chip (very quickly) measures the voltage on the capacitor relative to a reference and decides whether it has enough power to “do the thing”. If it does not, it signals to the TPL5110 to turn itself off for another 2 hours to let more charge build up.
If it does have enough power, the ATTiny10 either “does the thing” itself or switches a MOSFET to activate another system or whatever. The “thing” can be to use the power stored in the pseudocapacitor to charge a battery for a short time (e.g. around a second), if you want. Afterward, the system goes back to sleep until it has a relevant amount of power again. However it’s often a battle to outpace the self-discharge of a lithium cell, so having the system “do a thing” without a battery present is often better.
This does result in practical stuff sometimes, especially when using low-light solar. Besides sensor networks, you can for example manufacture replacements for tritium indicator lights this way that only activate on at night. In my experience, an SMT indicator LED is quite visible at night with under 10 uA of current. I have a series of ridiculously overengineered indicator lights that stick to the top of doorframes so I don’t hit my head on them at night (I am quite tall, and live in a traditional home in Asia).
Incidentally, I tried building a resonant circuit at 60Hz and was able to pick up a few mV from nearby fluorescent lights – not enough to use. I used a ridiculously large coil of wire that I happen to have lying around. A more fun trick is to use LEDs as their own power source – during the day they work as tiny solar cells, and that lets them flash occasionally at night :D
My wife gifted me this super cute mini miffy diorama from a gachapon. It uses two 1,5V cells and has a tiny led in it. I would really love to to add a 24h timer. ( it should stay on for 4 hours after turning it on then go to “standby” for 20h before turning back on) Do you guys think an attiny85 is the right thing for the...
I use the Attiny10 in this context. At 3.5V operation and using the Watchdog timer + deep sleep… that should cost you about 4.5 uA when the lamp is off. Then a bit more when it is on (about 40uA assuming whatever the GPIO is connected to is high impedance), as you have to enable the I/O clock (but most things and peripherals can stay off). So an average consumption of 10.4 uA, or 31 years of operation off two 1.5V cells – of course they’re not rated for this long and the actual light will consume far far more power. The point is that the current consumption of the system is absolutely dominated by the light-producing component, in other words the control system is highly efficient.
You can implement as a state machine, e.g. something vaguely like:
Set WDT to trigger an interrupt instead of the RESET vector. Then set WDT to trigger after 8s. Then on wake increment a register (you will need 2 registers, 8 bits isn’t enough). Compare these registers to constants that set the timer duration. On compare match, change the machine state.
Machine state 1: GPIO HIGH, timer duration 4h, I/O clock enabled. CPU sleep mode IDLE. Machine state 2: GPIO LOW, timer duration 20h, sleep mode POWER DOWN.
I think in assembly language but should be a similar process in C++. I’ve successfully implemented very similar (night-light timing) algorithms on this chip. I can’t give you power consumption metrics as none have ever run out of power over the past 6 months.
I just came across this and thought I’d share. I’ve struggled to get headers and IC’s off boards after soldering them on backwards/upside down. This video shows a cool trick with a piece of copper wire that makes them very easy and quick to get off without expensive tooling. I was thoroughly impressed. Hope someone else...
Haha, I’ve done that too. However sometimes it rips the pads off or otherwise damages the vias. So instead I cut them along the other axis (parallel to the PCB), then remove the remaining nibs.
These days I mostly use a hot air rework station though. In my city this is integrated with many soldering stations on the market, for maybe an extra 10$. I think mine is Yihua brand, it’s quite OK.
Sanity check for LiFePO4 Charger Design
So, there are these great 32700 LiFePO4 batteries that showed up in my local industrial market. For like USD 2$!...
Ferrit core as 555 trigger?
To all the electronic nerds out there: I am trying to trigger a 555 timer by movement in a random direction that also occurs randomly and any change in position should trigger the 555. AFAIK tilt switches are not useable here. Does this idea make sense?...
Looking for really small motors
Im building a flashlight and i want to test if a fan in it would be a good idea but the flashlight is really small so i would need a motor thats smaller than 1 cm preferably. I found really good ones at maxon group but unless you order them in bulk(1000+ units) they cost like 400€. So do yall know anywhere i could find them?...
Siglent SDS1104XE: slanted square wave (imgur.com)
Hi!...
How should I get started?
Hello y’all! I’ve always been interested in computers and programming for as long as i can remember, but recently i’ve decided to try to get into some of the deeper stuff behind that, into the wonderful world of electronics. Where should I start? What courses or books or youtube series should I consume? What are some...
Considering positioning strategies for autonomous mechanum-wheeled robots
Disclaimer: this is not specifically for a commercial product, but various things I design sometimes get commercialized. I mention this so that you may decide whether you want to weigh in. If it’s commercialized, I will probably make very little money but a bunch of university students may get a neat STEM program in the...
Learning about electronics
Hello! What would be a good way to learn about electronics in terms of creating them? I’m particularly interested in building my own keyboards and other PC peripherals, but I’m not sure what tools I would need, or what’s a good knowledge base if I run into any issues. Any tips and or suggestions?
Is “harvesting” small amounts of electricity a fools errand?
Serious question from a beginner in electronics. For reasons I do not fully understand, I have become fixated on the idea of collecting small amounts of electricity from “interesting” sources. I don’t mean “free energy”, instead, I mean things like extracting a few mV from being so close to a AM radio tower using two...
Attiny85 the right choice for 24h led timer?
My wife gifted me this super cute mini miffy diorama from a gachapon. It uses two 1,5V cells and has a tiny led in it. I would really love to to add a 24h timer. ( it should stay on for 4 hours after turning it on then go to “standby” for 20h before turning back on) Do you guys think an attiny85 is the right thing for the...
Neat trick for desoldering many-pin components (youtu.be)
I just came across this and thought I’d share. I’ve struggled to get headers and IC’s off boards after soldering them on backwards/upside down. This video shows a cool trick with a piece of copper wire that makes them very easy and quick to get off without expensive tooling. I was thoroughly impressed. Hope someone else...