Ok, It has been a while since I made a blog post here.
There are many reasons for this, most of them revolve around family and health matters.
But enough of that. Time for an update on my endeavors in building and creating
First off the Thermometer project I have been slowly cobbling together since I got into using Arduino MCUs (about 6 months ago)
This project had a long run. It has been stable and powered on and working successfully since january.
There are still many improvements I would like to make to it.
First one is that I want to shrink the overall size. So I have purchased a Nokia LCD screen and an Arduino Nano USB and a Ethernet "shield" for the nano.
Once I get that all working as well as I had the mega then I will work on the next phase of the morphing of this project
That is got get it online. currently it is visible online only on my local network, I want it on the web.
I would like to have a webpage hosted somewhere that it updates the information once every 10 minutes or so,
I don't want it to be too often because having satellite internet I have strict upload limits.
But I know even less about making a webpage than I did about programming C++ before I started this whole thing, so we will see how well that goes.
Next, I took a side trip detour and finally started, built, programmed and finished something that my wife asked me to do in December.
It is a Christmas decoration that had been sitting on my workbench since then. I figured with all the traveling we are going to be doing over the summer there was a good chance if I didn't do it before we left, I would probably forget about it till it was Christmas then it would be too late. You can see what I wrote about it here as well as some pictured of my (messy) wiring. LOL: https://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=53413
Next I am working on an LED lighting project that I hope to complete this summer. this is less Arduino and more playing with LED strips and high power LEDs, but still related nonetheless
Discussion of that begins with post 18 in this discussion http://www.element14.com/community/thread/33288?start=15&tstart=0
I know now I really should have started a new discussion for that. Oh well
I am also trying to learn about wireless communications between Arduinos and figure out how to set up some wireless projects.
If anyone knows of any good tutorials on using either nRF24L01 modules or the 433MHz transmitter receivers to make a simple connection point me the way.
Basically for learning all I really want to be able to do is have one Arduino with buttons and another with LEDs and have the button one the one toggle the LED assigned to it on the other.
I am sure something like this has been done, I am just having no luck finding any info.
Discussion: http://www.element14.com/community/thread/33585/l/arduino-wireless-help
And lastly that I care to discuss here I am working on building a couple benchtop power supplies from some old ATX power supplies that I inherited.
I got about 20 of these Dell power supplies and I want to make use of at least a couple of them.
So I am going to use an Arduino with an 8 channel relay board to switch the main power, 4 channels of 5V, 2 channels of 12V and 1 channel of 3.3V
I am adding fuse protection on on all outputs independently for some protection since I am good at putting wires where they shouldn't go.
We will see how this one turns out I am getting help building an enclosure form a family member sometime this summer.
Ok, aside from wanting to learn more about "everything" that is mostly what I have in progress right now.
Other things of interest or devices I plan to experiment with at some point:
-Learning to use TLC5940 chips to drive LEDs
-Write more sketches to learn and understand both "if" and "for"
-Learn how to use an LM317
-Learn how to use a ENC28J60 ethernet module
-Figure out how to have a network (internet) connected Arduino receive and display messages sent to it from the web
-Learn to use an I2C OLED display
-Learn IR interfacing for Arduino
-build a robot - yes I am serious, eventually i would like to build and program a robot.
-learn what I am doing wrong with ATtiny85 chips when programming with Arduino as ISP
-Try to figure out why my brain can't think about just one thing at a time