Category: Electronics
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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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QmuBeacon – ESP32 and LoRa based GPS recovery beacon and locator
Having a broken leg, limited mobility, and paid sick leave have some perks after all. I’ve finally found some free time to sit on the project I started, I think, two years ago: ESP32, LoRa based GPS beacon, and locator. You know, put it on an airplane and have a way to get the distance…
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ESP8266, ESP32 and ESP32-S2 comparison
Currently, there are 2 types of MCU from Espressif on the market: ESP8266 from 2014, ESP32 from 2016 and ESP32-S2 that debuted in the second half of 2019. Although ESP32-S2 is not yet very popular, it is expected it will replace ESP8266 as a cheaper, more powerful and more secure alternative in the upcoming years.…
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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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Do It Yourself liquid soldering flux
Do you know you can make your own liquid soldering flux? And possibly flux pen refill for cheap? All you need is some solid soldering rosin and 95% ethanol alcohol. Cheap, kind of dirty, but works…
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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…