September 2018

arduino stuff

Circuits on Tinkercad provides an Arduino and hardware simulator, run Arduino code, play with LEDs, oscilloscopes etc.

We had a discussion of interrupts as well. Maybe we should explore this topic further.

Sonoff POW device

Rob. B gave an update of Tasmota firmware for these devices. Here is a writeup done previously here

solar tracking software

Python Code here

Give the code latitude, longitude and time, it will tell you the azimuth and altitude of the sun (azimuth measured from true north clockwise, altitude measured from horizon)

https://suncalc.org is a website which gives you a more graphic-rich representation of solar location.

control servo motor with raspberry pi

Code here

A raspberry pi GPIO pins are 3.3V tolerant, whereas the servo needs 5V, the consequence being that: a) need to use separate power supply and b) used a separate board, 16 channel PWM driver board.

Servo details: Adafruit Analog Feedback Servo

Servo documentation: Servos

PWM board: Adafruit 16-Channel 12-bit PWM/Servo Driver

PWM documentation: PCA9685

Python tidbits

Had an interesting discussion about python modules, what they are (basically just normal python code).

Ideas for future meetings

  • attendance app using qr code using python/android

.