Posts

Over the weekend, I wanted to implement a back porch lighting system powered by my solar setup. The solar setup has 3 foot by 5 foot 240 Watt 24VDC panel, 100Ah Lithium Iron Phosphate battery, and a Rover 20 Amp charge controller. Here’s my panel: The charge controller and battery are both inside a Rubbermaid container to protect from the elements. The porch overhang keeps it mostly dry, but some storms blow the rain in sideways. I’ve audited the dryness of the container after a few wicked storms and never seen a drop of moisture inside. Here’s the box and controller: ...

I’m working on a mini arcade based on the Pi Pico 2. There’s much more to be done, but it’s coming along enough to do a small writeup and post the code/schematics. The bill of materials: Pi Pico 2 240x240 Display with ST7789 driver Keyes AD Key 5 button analog controller 8 Ohm speaker with a 150-220 Ohm resistor for basic sound output Breadboard Jumper Wires Here’s the schematic for connections: ...

I’m working on a bigger project right now that will release later, but one of the building blocks that I want to highlght is this device: This is the Keyes_AD_Key 5 switch, 3 wire controller interface. I was interested upon seeing the low price of this item as well as the small wire count. So how does it work? The 3 pins are VCC, GND, and OUT. The OUT pin needs to be connected to an ADC pin on the microcontroller to decode which buttons are being pressed. The buttons activate different valued resistors on a resitor ladder that pulls to ground, reading the differing voltages can be decoded into the button presses. ...

I recently picked up a Pico-ePaper-2.13 from Waveshare. This is a great, small e-ink display with a fast refresh time designed for interfacing with the Pi Pico. I want to make a few things with this, but I’m going to start out making a clock/weather widget display for your desk. I’m using a Pi Pico 2W for the extra ooomph, altho a Pi Pico 1W would work for this application. ...

Test post. Code block test: 1 2 3 from machine import Pin led = Pin(25, Pin.OUT) led.on()