Hardware

I have a doorbell camera in the UniFi Protect ecosystem. I wanted a way to show the doorbell stream on a low cost wall mounted display that integrates will with the existing home automations. I have a pair of these ESP32-S3 based screens, they are very common on aliexpress under the name “ESP32-S3 Development Board LVGL 4.0 inch 480*480 Smart Display”. I paid $40AUD or less for them. They consist of a front touch display connected to an ESP32-S3, with then an extra (optional) board that clips on the back that has a power supply and relay output. For my use case I generally dont use the relay so I can’t talk to how it performs. ...

Often I find myself needing to join/split cables in a situation where its going to be outdoors in full on rainy weather. I have tried using the common cable joiner enclosures like these: But every single time, they all fail due to water ingress, no matter how much the seals are torqued down. It could be my shitty luck for sure, but after this happening enough times I’ve moved to just epoxy encasing joins. ...

I picked up a Mac Pro 2008 2.8GHz model locally, and it worked well when I first powered it up and loaded snow leopard on it. However, I then upgraded the GPU in it (for fun) and the PSU went bang (loudly). As new PSU’s are hard to come by / expensive locally (and I couldn’t find an easy issue to fix upon opening) the Mac has been upgraded to instead recieving a refit of new insides. ...

I still use my Xbox 360 after all these years. Not as often as I once did of course, but at least once a month its up and running to play games. The Xbox 360 controller uses a small battery pack to hold two AA’s or could take a sealed unit with Ni-Mh batteries and be charged with a custom cable. As these are loong out of production by Microsoft, any stock you find is DOA as the cells have died. ...

As is relatively well known, both the Wii and Wii U have extremely limited power output on their USB ports. Nintendo appears to have limited these to exactly the 0.5A of USB 2.0. As the Disk drive in my Wii U has started to become intermittent at reading disks I went through rapidly backing these up to an external hard drive to prevent the device from effectively becoming a brick. However; using any external drives requires either a Y power splitter cable or externally powered drives. While functional it’s certainly ugly. ...

Where we left off Part 1 covered the quick rundown of selecting the STM32 and assigning a rough pinout in STMCube. Part 2 provided a quick through the schematic capture process and PCB layout at a high level. Part 3 covered exporting the PCB for manufacture and a quick run through the ordering process with PCBWay. Disclaimer In this section, I’m using PCBWay for the ordering process example. They have kindly offered to cover the cost of the production of these PCB’s before this series actually went live. They offered some free PCB’s around the time I was writing part two, making it very convenient to use their services for this series of posts. ...

H2O N2 - Water Cooling an Odroid N2 In mid-2018, I started to move all of my home server use and compute from an HP microserver G8 over to ARM-based SBC’s. This move was inspired initially as a power-saving exercise to save the idle power draw of the microserver (50-100W). The original setup consisted of an Odroid C1 running standard developer services and the microserver moving to just acting as a backup device that only powered on to handle backing up computers in the house. ...

Where we left off Part 1 covered the quick run down of selecting the STM32 and assigning a rough pinout in STMCube. Part 2 provided a quick through the schematic capture process and pcb layout at a high level. Part 3 here will cover the exporting the PCB for manufacture and a quick run through the ordering process with PCBWay. Disclaimer In this section I’m using PCBWay for the ordering process example. They have kindy offered to cover the cost of the production of these PCB’s before this series actually went live. They offered some free PCB’s around the time I was writing part two, making it very convient to use their services for this series of posts. ...

Where we left off Part 1 covered the quick run down of selecting the STM32 and assigning a rough pinout in STMCube. Part 2 here will run through the schematic capture process and pcb layout at a high level. Schematic Capture I design exclusively in KiCad now, having completely moved off other platforms over the past few years. As such this guide will only cover KiCad related design work. I highly reccomend using hierarchical sheets in your design, to allow for both (some) reuse, as well as make the seperate building blocks clearly definied. Please, please, do not just throw your entire schematic on one page, it makes for a highly unreadable schematic for anyone else who comes along. ...

Outline This is a half walkthrough / half hints guide to taking a base concept for a STM32 from idea to (somewhat) working hardware. The goal is to roughly document the path I use, but not bogging down into the details on things that are easier to google. For this series, I’m looking at designing out a small development board, designed to mount to the quite nice ILI9486 LCD unit. I’m designing this mostly so that its in a nicer form factor than other development boards, and so I can use USB-C as I really dislike USB mini-B. ...