Category: Electronics
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FS1000A and XY-MK-5V – How they work – cheap 433MHz Arduino radio
The FS1000A transmitter and XY-MK-5V 433Mhz receivers are probably the cheapest options if you want to do any kind of radio transmission with Arduino. And many people assume that it will work in their application no problem. The truth is, that it’s not that simple. The way how whose 433MHz radio modules are made puts…
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Is 6S more efficient than 4S?
There is a popular opinion, a myth maybe, that drones powered by 6S LiPo batteries fly much longer and are much more efficient than their 4S counterparts. You know, lower current and lower KV motors need less current for the same torque. The problem with this opinion is that it’s only partially correct. Yes, the…
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TVS – Transil diodes to the rescue
We like to think that voltage in electronics is, if not constant, then at least it’s not going above the supply voltage. So if we apply 5V at the input of the electronic device, it will never go unintentionally above 5V inside. It is, however, not true. As soon as you add any type of…
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LILYGO T5 4.7-inch E-paper ESP32 development board
One of the biggest advantages of ESP32 development boards (without even counting the speed, flash size, WiFi, Bluetooth, and two cores) is that they come in a variety of shapes and sizes: bare boards, with OLED, with color LCD, with LoRa chipset, with GPS modem, etc., etc. And finally, you can get them with an…
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Espressif ESP32-S2
When Espressif release ESP32 WiFi & Bluetooth capable MCUs back in 2016, many things changed in the DIY and tinkerers community. We finally had a cheap MCU that could do real IoT stuff and was easy to use. However, the cheap ESP32 is not really cheap in relative terms. Sure, it is cheap, but there…
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ESP8266 and ESP32 – the main differences
ESP8266 and ESP32 are the next best thing that happened to DIY world since Arduino itself. Thanks to development boards based on those MCUs brand new possibilities opened in front of all DIY and tinkering enthusiasts. With those two, not only we have cheap and powerful microcontrollers, but we can also make them talk to…
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Low Pass Filter Experiments
All flight controllers we use in RC hobby (FlightOne, Betaflight, INAV, Pixhawk, dRonin, and all the other) use low pass filters. What does a low pass filter do? It passes low-frequency components of a signal (below cutoff frequency) but attenuates high-frequency signal components (above the cutoff frequency). Since it’s hard to make a visualization of…
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Impedance Matching 101
Why do we match the impendance? And what the heck the impedance really is? 50Ohm, 75Ohm, low impedance, high impedance, reflections and all that crap that normal people usually ignore. Nobody said that we are “normal” over here so let’s take a look at this whole input/output impedance matching business.
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ESP32 and GPS with a help of TinyGPS++ library
One of the first projects I did with ESP32 development boards is a simple GPS tracker. OK, it's not really a tracker since it does not store the position anywhere, more like distance meter with a UBLOX Neo-8M Beitian BN-880 GPS unit and small SSD1306 OLED display. This ESP32 GPS Thingy as I call it…