The official Arduino WiFi shield is an easy but expensive option to get your Arduino on the wireless network. But there is a cheaper nasty way that actually offers you lots more options. A bunch of hackers have started re-engineering commercial Wifi-routers opening them up and updating the firmware to allow them to easily connect to the Wifi-routers with break-out boards like Arduino’s. The TP-Link … Read More →
Author Archives: Bertus Kruger
Making professional looking front panels for your electronics projects.
I good-looking front panel always impresses me. Phil from JumperOne.com has made a very nice step by step tutorial on how to make your projects look as good as the one below.
MYSQL – Getting Your Local Time
Time zones are always tricky. Luckily Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) makes it easy to get your local time even if your database is hosted on the other side of the world. The code below returns the local time in New Zealand.
Hand held digital milling – FreeD
Duplicating hand-made items with a little help from our computer friends… 😛
HTML Problem Finder
When writing code for a webpage it can be hard to keep all the latest standards in mind. To be fair even the best programmers sometimes make mistakes… So to make sure your code is up to the latest coding standards you can use the following validation services : W3C Markup Validations Service. It will … Read More →
DIY CNC Machinable Wax
Machinable wax is very useful for testing new prototypes before machining the designs from more expensive materials. Below is a video of a DIY CNC machine ( Shapeoko ) cutting wax. Machinable wax usually comes in blue blocks or cylinders that look like these and is a bit expensive. Luckily it’s not that hard to make your own machinable wax at home and … Read More →
Build a Laser Cutter from old PC parts.
Warning!!! Put on your Laser safety glasses before watching the video.. Parts needed: Old Power supply CPU Heat sinks DVD Burner SLED (Or SLED-815) Aixiz module Voltage regulator(+ 3 ohm resistor) – LM317 – DigiKey Thermal Glue What can you cut with it? This laser diode is powerful enough to cut through paper and thin plastic. Good for engraving and … Read More →
RC Night Time Racing (RC Car + LEDs + ATTiny)
Introduction I recently bought a Turnigy Trooper SCT 4×4 1/10 Brushless Short Course Truck from HobbyKing.com and decided I wanted to do a bit of night time racing. For this projects I wanted some led’s and to round it off I wanted to use a Micro-Controller add extra lighting effects. For this project I picked the Atmel ATTiny84 micro-controller and … Read More →
Arduino – Don’t waste your 1K of RAM on printing to the Serial Port.
The Arduino board’s are mostly limited to 1K of RAM (1000 bytes!!!) with a few Mega boards going up to 16K.. This made me appreciates today’s PC’s that can accommodate/consume Gigabytes of RAM. Take for instance a PC with 4GB of ram. That’s about your average PC I would say. Compare that to a Arduino’s tiny 1K of … Read More →
Arduino – HTTP Post Requests
Connecting your Arduino to the internet is pretty simple. Just get the Ethernet shield and use the Ethernet examples to start with. I wanted to use my Arduino to capture information and post it to my website where I could format the data as needed. (Pachube/Cosm is another option, but I wanted more freedom to … Read More →
