From the category archives:

Tinkering

Palo Altona – Hamburg Tinker Drinkup

14 January 2010 Tinkering
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Die deutsche Version gibt es nach dem Klick (und dann weiter unten).
This time it is all non-technical (technically not – but that starts to get complicated). To further encourage tinkering in Hamburg, Alex and I have established a regularly tinker drinkup every Thursday (nearly) at Saal II.

Currently it is a very cosy drinkup, just a [...]

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Seasonal Greetings

20 December 2009 Tinkering
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This is definitively the last post for this year. So I wish everybody Merry Christmas or whatever you want to celebrate and a pleasant & successful new year!

Even I stopped tinkering and went on to hacking cookies. Have fun & take care!

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Filtering Sensor Data with a Kalman Filter

18 December 2009 Tinkering
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Some days ago I wrote about noise with a LIS302DL accelerometer. There is obviously something wrong with my hardware. But before I get a new version out I need to implement some software filtering.

After some unsuccessful results with low pass filters I choose the Kalman Filter. The Kalman Filter involves an awful lot of complicated [...]

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Decoupling LIS302DL – There I fixed it!

15 December 2009 Tinkering
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As you probably know, I really like I2C sensors and especially the LIS302DL. But adding this accelerometer to your circuit is not as straight forward as I thought. But in the end I got it quite right.

It all started out with a 0.1µF ceramic capacitor. For good measure I put a ferrite bead in front. [...]

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Driving Circuits from a CR2032 Lithium Coin Cell

29 August 2009 Tinkering
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Just another good example of ‘lesson learned’. I often use the very common CR2032 coin cell batteries to drive my circuits. Small, cheap, easy to get and there is a quite a range of good and cheap battery holders.

But recently I have tested an complete over the top design which pushed the poor little CR2032 [...]

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Interactive Matter: The first year!

11 August 2009 Tinkering
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Unbelievable that this is just the first year of Interactive Matter. But still there happened a lot of things.

Lets have a look on what Interactive Matter has managed to achieve.

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Arduino & AD7746

18 July 2009 Sensors
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In my ongoing series about cool sensors Interactive Matter presents the AD7746 capacity sensor:

What is a capacity sensor good for? You can of course make a device to identify small capacitance (up to 4pF) but that’s boring. Much more interesting is how it reacts to touching.
Read on how to connect it to the Arduino and [...]

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Doing business with makepcb.com

17 June 2009 Tinkering
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Trying a new board house is always an adventure. Of course I use BatchPCB for small scale prototyping. But for an upcoming project I needed some higher quantity of boards for a cheaper price. So some ‘real’ board house must be found. There are so many options, that I do not try to list all [...]

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64 Pixels Roundup

20 May 2009 Tinkering
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As a effect of the Space Invaders Button I learned a lot about all those LED Matrix projects on the net. As a roundup I collected a short overview of all the different projects I found.

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SFH 3310 & SFH 5711 Light Sensors

18 May 2009 Sensors
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After I successfully shed some light its time to see some light. For this you normally use photo diodes, photo transistors or photo resistors. But there are two nice little detectors which I came across, special enough to post them here:

The Osram SFH 3710 and SFH 5711. Both are photo diodes respectively transistors adapted to [...]

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Low Voltage RGB LED

9 May 2009 Tinkering
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Most of my parts want a 3.3V voltage supply. Most of my projects relay on a single coin cell battery at 3V. But driving an RGB LED from 3V is no fun at all. Lets take for example a nice strong RGB LED like the Osram LRTB G6TG – the green channel runs at 3.2V, [...]

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My couch programmer

11 April 2009 Tinkering
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Some days ago I searched for an small USB-based AVR programmer. After some research I stumbled over an new old friend. The AvrUsb500 SMD from tuxgraphics.org:

To make it short: It is a bit pricey but exactly what I was looking for. But read the full review after the click.

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Arduino & LIS302DL

13 February 2009 Sensors
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Ages ago I bought an LIS302DL from Sparkfun. One of the old (little bit) messed up ones, but still 3 axis accelerometer with I2C output. No external parts. No pain. Fine!

Before I go in any further investigation. I need to get it up & running with my arduino (actually an boarduino – but who cares?). [...]

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Last year in electronics

4 January 2009 Tinkering
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One of the best way to see what I achieved last year is to have a look at my electronics trash can:

Somehow nice and gives a good overview (a lot of through the hole stuff, some audio stuff, some more or less successful projects, some SMT efforts). Lets see what I throw away this year.
And [...]

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Tinkering with ADJD-S371-Q999

17 August 2008 Sensors
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The initial idea of “How was your day, darling” was to record the colors for a day. You know a morning is golden, evening is reddish, thunderstorm is greenish and so on. Measuring this with a simple RGB LED is a brave approach – but hard and cumbersome. So I ordered an ADJD-S371-Q999 color sensor [...]

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