scottyau

So I guess I hacked Scotty’s account… or he just gave me access because he’s a top bloke. Either way I decided I better make good use of his blog space and post something constructive. I thought I’d start with a couple of simple projects I completed. Today I’ll delve into my Air Conditioner Controller. Sometime next week I’ll show off my Arduino powered GPS Speedometer that won me $50 bucks from Jaycar. So this little project came about over summer. We were getting some very hot days and I have a ten year old swampy on the roof of my house (an evaporative cooler). One of the multitude of problems with coolers like this is that the take ages to actually start bringing the temperature down. So after a long hot day away from home it takes a good thirty to forty minutes to bring the temperature down to something reasonable.   I can’t leave the thing going as a swampy requires the windows and doors to be open otherwise you end up with condensation over everything after two or th...

I follow quite a few electronics type blogs now, they're a great way to learn new things and see what other people are making.  One particular blog that I've been following for quite some time is  Kevin Rye .  If you haven't checked out his blog before go get a coke and sit down and have a read. He announced last month that he was selling a limited run of kits of the latest version of his Mini 7-Segment Clock - so I ordered two.  Not only are the clocks awesome, but it would be a great chance to do some more SMD work, I get to burn a bootloader to an ATMega and program it with the FTDI usb-serial adapter I recently got. They arrived this week and I sat down this afternoon to put them together.  I just followed along the blog post and assembled them both in that order: I made up the cable to burn the boot loader using my Arduino Uno and then used my FTDI adapter to upload the sketch: One worked first go, the second one had the same segment o...

I like listening to music while I work.  I stream a lot of music over the internet from places like  SomaFM  and  Pandora .  I wanted something though that would play music for me while I work that was independent of my MacBook Pro.  Seemed like a good way to go was a Raspberry Pi with the  Adafruit LCD . I love the stuff from Adafruit.  It's always great quality and has very clear instructions and in most cases tutorials on how you might like to use some of the bits.  So I ordered my LCD kit (and some other bits) and waited. Once the bits arrived it was a very straight forward matter of following the instructions to put the LCD shield together: Pretty simple.  Once I confirmed the LCD worked as expected I moved onto the  Adafruit pi wifi radio tutorial . This by and large worked - there were just two small pieces I had to change to make this work 100% for me.  The first was that the current pianobar package...