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GitHub Actions changes to fight cryptocurrency miners
GitHub actions are a great CI/CD setup for every open-source project. Of course, as long, as the project is hosted on GitHub. It turned out, however, that cryptocurrency miners started to take advantage of that and propose abusive pull requests that were mining cryptos using GitHub computing power. This changed somehow. Yes, if you really,…
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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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The State of the RC/FPV Hobby Q1 2021 – The results
A few months ago I aske the RC/FPV community a series of questions what they use and how they fly. Today, it is time to announce the results!In total, I got answers from 1739 people. I will not lie: the number is like 10 times higher I expected it to be. So that you! I…
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Pirx Seven vs DJI FPV
I designed the Pirx Seven 7-inch FPV frame when the DJI Digital FPV System was something as a novelty. Truth to be told, back then I have not believed it will so popular as it is today. Turned out, I was wrong on that and the DJI Digital FPV System is incredibly popular. Luckily, the…
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How to generate PPM signal with ESP32 and Arduino
The PPM protocol for encoding Remote Control channel values is now a legacy. Still, it is widely accepted by different hardware and when tinkering with Arduino, remote control, and working on own accessories for flight controllers, PPM is still a valid option. A few years ago I presented a code that allows generating PPM stream…
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ESP32, Arduino and Timer/Alerts
Because of completely different architecture, ISR and Timer solutions known from other Arduino compatible platforms, especially AVR/ATmega does not work on ESP32. They don't. At all. If you would like to port any code that uses timers from AVR Arduino to ESP32 Arduino, you would have to rewrite them completely. However, timers and alarms with…
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DIY Drone Gesture Control – DIY Motion Controller
Together with the DJI FPV Drone we, RC and FPV hobby enthusiasts, got a new accessory: DJI Motion Controller. It does a pretty obvious thing that we know for years from the Nintendo Wii controller: with this device, you get gesture control over your FPV Drone. You tilt it left, drone turns left. You tilt…
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ESP32 and multiple I2C buses
One of the advantages of the ESP32 microcontrollers over the competitions is dual-core architecture and two I2C buses. Yes, the I2C bus allows connecting multiple slave devices to single pair of SCL SDA wires. As long as slave device addresses are unique, everything will work just fine: OLED display, LM75 temperature sensor, MPU6050 gyroscope. However,…
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FPV meets corporation – DJI FPV Goggles V2 vs V1 and availability
Why can't I buy DJI goggles anymore All of you who tried to buy FPV goggles in the last three months might have noticed that it was not a trivial endeavor. Starting from the last December, the DJI Goggles and Air Units and Caddx Vistas availability was limited. To some extent, it was due to…