Remote Sensors and Work Light
I’ve been working on a couple of projects. Firstly upgraded temperature sensors for the MING home monitoring project. The Pico were using power even when sleeping so battery life was low. The temperature drop here has also reduced battery life.
So I’ve swapped to some ESP2866 boards. I have a NodeMCU board from sourced recently from AliExpress and also an Adafruit Huzzah Feather which I’ve had for some time now. I also purchased some DS18B20 sensors, these supposedly have better resolution than the DHT11 modules but only do temperature not humidity. So I’ll probably still use the other sensors for some locations.
The DS18B20 sensor uses the “OneWire” protocol but I just couldn’t get it to work with the Feather board. Through a process of elimination and using the “search” examples and an UNO as a standin.l, I concluded I had one duff sensor. The other 2 changes to get this to work on the Feather board were to use a smaller pull-up resistor, 1K rather than 4K7. And to swap to digital pin 12. The other ones were shared with other features and that seemed to stop this sensor from working. I added a temporary display to aid debugging.
The second project is a work light. I welded this together from scrap the other weekend before running out of welding gas. Have some leads to follow to get a replacement.
I also need to work out how to power this, I’ve some big LED panels that run off 12v and take about 800mA. So will likely use some small lead acid batteries to run this but need to charge them first. Can probably do that with the bench power supply. Also need to paint this, have given it a couple of coats but it’s not looking good at this point. Have some spray paint to try after sanding it back. Doesn’t need to be pretty but an even coat would be nice.
Posted in: Inspiration
Metal sculpture in brass, mounted on an 1800s French Coin
