RE: Blinken' and Clicken' the DAC for vADC | Part 2

DAB — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 20:44:20 GMT

I like the idea of building an ADC from scratch.

DAB

RE: Blinken' and Clicken' the DAC for vADC | Part 2

baldengineer — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 16:52:57 GMT

A few people (outside of the community) have asked me about the big blue board the bits are sitting on. That is the "Practical IoT Microcontroller Trainer" board. It is sold by the Blue Smoke Monster Project. The board contains an Arduino Nano (clone), ESP-01, ESP32, and header for Raspberry Pi. All of the I/O pins for the microcontrollers are broken out to make it easy to connect to other devices. On-board there is an I2C OLED, a SPI TFT Touch screen, an HC-05 Bluetooth Module, some ws2812 (NeoPixels), pushbuttons, and rotary encoders.

In this case, I am running my code on the Nano. The Nano's 5 volts, from USB, is powering the trainer and my DAC boards. I'm not using the breadboard for this design. But I am jumping from the Bald Bits to the Nano headers on the PiOT board. (and at one point, I almost connected the push buttons so I could change speeds, but ran out of time.)

You can get the Practical IoT as a full kit (that's what I bought) or just the bare board if you have some of the hardware already. I like it because it is an all-in-one board for common MCU hardware. BSM is working on improvements and a new revision, but I think this board is still worthwhile.

Apologies if this sounds like an ad. Josh, its creator, is a friend of mine. That said, I did buy my kit and I would think it is worth the price even if I didn't know him.