Nico teWinkel's Blog

Power's Out, but we're online!

2024-11-20T19:44:35Z

Big storm today off the BC West Coast, they call it a "bomb cyclone" Thankfully we had power through most of the storm, but it did just drop offline an hour ago. The good news is... the battery backups are working to keep us connecte...(read more)

Garden Shed Solar Lighting

2024-07-09T00:00:12Z

I have a garden shed at the far corner of our lot. It has a window, and the door has a window, but it can be hard to see in there. For a while I had a dollar-store battery operated motion light that worked quite well, but it uses D or C cells, I forg...(read more)

Off grid for the day

2023-09-07T03:57:01Z

We took a little day trip today, on the Uchuck III from Gold River to Friendly Cove, on Vancouver Island, BC. There’s zero cell coverage after you pass Campbell River, so we were fully disconnected for the day. Feels a little weird, but so nice...(read more)

Arduino R4 WiFi Bug? BLE + LED Matrix

2023-08-06T22:09:07Z

I think I just ran into an early-stage bug on the Arduino Uno R4 WiFi. My previous 2 blog posts separately covered displaying frames on the LED Matrix and Receiving BLE commands.Combining the 2 sketches, however, caused it to break. When I first just...(read more)

Arduino Uno R4 WiFi - Receiving Commands Via BLE

2023-08-05T19:05:47Z

The Arduino Uno R4 WiFi has an ESP32 WiFi module on it, which includes Bluetooth (BLE). When it was first released, the BLE part was not yet implemented, but you can upgrade the firmware on your Arduino Uno R4 WiFi board that enables it. Judging by t...(read more)

Arduino R4 WiFi - Using the LED display

2023-08-04T04:31:36Z

After trying the basic Blink sketch and blinking a single LED, I thought I'd up the ante by blinking a great many LEDs! I first tried out the included example LED_Matrix/DisplaySingleFrame, which shows up when you connect the board, or if you ch...(read more)

New heat shrink solder connectors

2023-07-13T21:50:34Z

I saw these on a new discount website (in Canada) and thought I’d try them out, as they are fairly inexpensive. I thought they might be handy when fixing something on the in-law’s boat or golf cart, for example. The idea is that they sol...(read more)

Retiring my Sprinkler Pi

2023-05-20T19:21:12Z

End of an Era! I’ve decided to retire my good ole Sprinkler Pi - an original Pi 1 B+ running OpenSprinkler, connected to my own home brew circuit board. It has been running successfully for 6 full seasons, only needing an occasional res...(read more)

Time well spent, wasted, or something

2023-01-13T20:33:55Z

I spent far too much time last night adding daily high and low temperature display to my Raspberry Pi node red hummingbird feeder monitoring UI. So many limitations and quirks to work around! First, Influxdb does not have a “start of day...(read more)

AI to create Arduino sketches

2022-12-22T04:31:41Z

I just became aware of an AI named chatGPT by OpenAI, which can do a lot of amazing things. As in, mind-blowing how well it does things! For example, you can ask for advice on how to get a better sleep, or even how to be more romantic, and the respon...(read more)

Ender 3 Pro Broken Extruder Arm

2022-11-04T00:23:08Z

As I might have mentioned in my previous blog post about 3D printing, I was having trouble getting my prints to come out half decently, especially with my newer filaments.I think I mentioned having extruder problems - the print lines were often a bit...(read more)

Coffee Maker Leveling Up!

2022-11-01T01:33:00Z

The good folks at element14 sent me this super awesome runner-up prize for the Experimenting With Thermistors Challenge: a DeLonghi coffee and espresso maker, and it arrived today! Here is my "before" picture: As I'm the only cof...(read more)

Learning to 3D Print

2022-10-29T01:05:00Z

I've had my 3D printer, a Creality Ender 3-Pro (from element14/Newark here), for a while, and I've printed random things like project cases, coins, and fun things with it. The prints usually came out alright. especially when printing with the Crealit...(read more)

Hiking With element14

2022-10-21T04:30:00Z

This hike was sponsored in part by element14 Like much of North America, we've had some unexpected weather - in our case it gave us a warm summer-like fall, which is supposed to end tomorrow.So we went up the mountain to hike the trails (Parad...(read more)

Quick Review of a Cool Alarm Clock Weather Station from Newark!

2022-10-18T06:03:00Z

I thought I'd share with you this little alarm clock weather station I picked up as part of a shopping cart earlier this year: I had wanted a little clock for the bedroom, because the one I had was rather hard to read, and the clock-radio-alarm thi...(read more)