Category: Making
These are posts about making in a variety of forms.
Teensy is a popular microcontroller ecosystem that I’ve highlighted on my site before. There are already a number of breakout shields on the market for most of the Teensy models. I’ve tried several, and written about them here. The breakout boards that I’ve tried were either overbuilt with way more ...
This is a rather old project meant as a supplement to other things I was working on in the audio realm. Adafruit notes: “As of May 23, 2016 we’ve updated this breakout to use the TPA2012 rather than the TS2012. This is an overall-equivalent part with slightly less power output. You ...
I found Daniel Gilbert’s Teensy 3.2 Breakout (Revision D) on Tindie during a web search while working on my Teensy Audio project. The breakout board was out of stock, so I put myself on the wait list immediately. As soon as they were available a few weeks later, I ordered two – one ...
The LinkSprite is an 8 x 8 LED matrix that can be used when you need something more sophisticated than a single LED to give feedback. It also opens up the world of creating letters, numbers and basic shapes. Extremely well documented, the Linksprite is very easy to get going ...
This idea came about from needing LEDs, buttons, trim pots and switches on hand to do quick tests on various devices. Most of the time, I just needed something to test an audio trigger or response from a sensor. All too often, the item I needed wouldn’t be where I ...
After making some advances with audio board selection and programming, it was time to go through my parts supply and explore various sensors to see how they could be employed. First up was the ZX Distance and Gesture Sensor made by Sparkfun. I have the original version which is now ...
The Sparkfun APDS-9960 RGB and Gesture Sensor is a fairly low-cost ($15) option for hands-free control of all kinds of things. I’ve had this sitting around for a while waiting to be integrated into a project, but I wanted to explore it on its own before making that leap. For ...
As discussed in my ongoing series of sound board experiments (most recently with the Adafruit Sound FX Board), I have been on a quest for an easy to use platform for sound installations and experimental projects. The basic spec for this project was as follows: My search for a good ...
This is a continuation of an earlier exploration of Adafruit’s FX Sound Board. Previously, I worked with the 2MB version, but soon found I needed more storage for the intended application. The 16 MB version is basically identical in functionality – just more storage. The attraction of this board is ...
Next up in IoT exploration is the Sparkfun ESP8266 Thing – part WRL-13231. Note that this is not the Dev board – a separate device with different pinout and other changes. Navigating Sparkfun’s hookup guide was fairly easy, especially since I had already installed the ESP8266 libraries as part of another project. The ...
A lot has changed since my last connected sensor project in 2013, so I wanted to jump in again to see how the technology has come along. After playing with some Particle Photon stuff, I came across NodeMCU. Hackster.io has lots of ideas for this board, so I sought to recreate ...