This blog is about my tinkering with Arduino and ESP microcontrollers.
I’m more of a ‘prototyper’ than a ‘maker’, with a focus on programming rather than hardware. Besides physical and IoT projects, I like the challenge of making math visualizations fit inside the limited specs of these boards.
Last finished project: Self-Hosted LoRaWan GPS Tracker
8-cylinder TFT display
Sports car in disguise... With its 8-bits parallel interface under the hood, this cheap MCUFriend 2.4″ TFT Arduino shield is ...
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ESP32-CAM demystified
I've always felt a bit intimidated by the many different ESP32 Camera boards, as well as by the abundance of ...
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Self-Hosted GPS Tracker
With my T-Beam GPS Tracker operating fine during car trips, I finally have a secure replacement for this very old ...
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TTGO T-Beam
joining TheThingsNetwork LoRaWan and TheThingsNetwork are quite popular in my country, although they may have lost part of their momentum ...
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Where ISS…?
Tracking the International Space Station (ISS) Borrowing most of its code from my What's Up? air traffic monitor, this small ...
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Virtual Radar Server
"What's Up? " revisited The discovery that you can run Virtual Radar Server (VRS) on a Raspberry Pi triggered me ...
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Stereoscopy on ESP32?
double trouble...? I knew in advance that trying to make an ESP32 show moving stereoscopic images on a TFT display ...
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View·Master goes 360°
Working on a couple of new display techniques, I turned my Webcam·View·Master into this endlessly looping 360° Panorama viewer. The ...
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Web images on TFT
"Bodmer vs Bodmer..." Looking for a fast way to have an ESP32 download and show web images on a TFT ...
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3 * (esp32 + tft) = ?
ESP32 boards with a mounted TFT display can be so hard to resist that, in a moment of shameless weakness, ...
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“Alpenblick”
Currently 'lockdown-ed' at sea level, my thoughts often wander to the majestic heights of my beloved Alps. After visiting one ...
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Inspiring Chaos
Wonder why I didn't discover Jason Rampe's Softology blog much earlier, as it deals with most of the math related ...
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M5Stack Fire
It looked like the perfect hardware for a couple of gadgets that I have in mind, but my enthusiasm for ...
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Multi-Fractal Explorer
One program to rule them all... The obvious code similarity between most of my fractal sketches prompted me to write ...
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2D arrays in PSRAM
This post shows a minimal example sketch for storing a 2D array in PSRAM memory of ESP32 WROVER modules. It's ...
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Strange attraction
fractals again... If chaos theory applies to this blog, then fractals are definitely among its strange attractors... Reading an article ...
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Greed for Speed
One of my first Arduino peripherals was this 3.5" touchscreen from Adafruit. It has a 480x320 resolution, an SD card ...
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Chips from the lathe
This first post of 2020 just shows some videos of mini projects from the past 3 months. Here's an improvement ...
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ADS-B Exchange!
Despite some turbulence within the ADS-B Exchange community after their API policy change, owner James Stanford kindly sent me a ...
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ADS-B Exchange(d?)
Please do feed! It's been over two years since the discovery of adsbexchange.com formed the inspiration for my What's Up? ...
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Self-replicating Cellular Automata
Studying John von Neumann's self-reproducing universal constructor* reminded me of some unfinished business in my earlier Cellular Automata (CA) projects ...
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Turbocharged TFT display
Here are some first results of the (speed) progress that I've made since my previous post about using PSRAM as ...
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PSRAM Display Buffer
One possible application of ESP32 WROVER's PSRAM memory is using it as a (double) display buffer. I thought this could ...
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Unripe (Ada)fruit?
I've always been an Adafruit fan, gladly supporting their open source contributions by buying their products. But recently, I was ...
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Pseudostatic Ram (PSRAM)
Just got me a second LOLIN D32 Pro v.2, this time with the newer ESP32-WROVER-B module on board. For just ...
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Spectrum Analyzer Revisited
Encouraged by the happy ending of the Swinging Needles project, I decided to revisit an earlier audio spectrum analyzer. This ...
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Swinging Needles (analog VU meters)
...finally! It took me some time (and strong coffee), but I finally managed to have the ESP32 version of my ...
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Mini MP3 Player
This little €4 module filled my entire weekend, mainly spent on finding the right documentation and a library that will ...
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Dual Core Business
Almost a year after finishing my ESP8266-based Internet Radio project, I still have had no idea why running that sketch ...
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PiAware & Automatic Gain Control
Odd fluctuations in my PiAware ADS-B receivers' coverage graphs made me wonder how AGC in dump1090-fa really worked, because information ...
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Both Sides Now…
With my FlightAware feeder now permanently mounted outside, I began thinking of installing a second ADS-B/Mode-S feeder at the opposite ...
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LOLIN TFT-2.4 Shield
Here's a well designed new display from Wemos Electronics. They call it a (D1 Mini) Shield, but instead of going ...
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ADS-B experiences
After two months of experimenting with a generic SDR dongle, a dedicated ADS-B dongle and a couple of antennas, here's ...
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Pi in the Sky
It had been waiting on the runway for some time, but now my tinkering with Raspberry Pi has finally been ...
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Radar Love
My What's Up? flight radar sketch for esp8266 relies on adsb-exchange.com for its data. In order to do something in ...
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Quest for Fire
By no means a gamer myself, I've always been interested in the math behind the graphics in video games. A ...
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Visual memory
Soon after my start with Arduino, I bought an external 32KB EEPROM, just in case a future project would need ...
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Busy Beaver
Today I discovered that Langton's Ant is not the only Turing machine that's nicknamed after an animal. There's also the ...
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Buddhabrot – the last fractal?
Writing sketches for posts in the Fractals category of this blog made me realize that for many fractals (e.g. Mandelbrot, ...
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ESP32 – mixed feelings
My ESP32 boards: LOLIN32 Pro, LOLIN32 Lite, LOLIN D32 and LOLIN D32 PRO [Please note that this is an old ...
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Tic-Tac-Toe trainer
Turning an Arduino into an invincible Tic-Tac-Toe master is hardly a challenge, but I wrote a sketch for it anyway ...
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Newton fractal
Here's another famous fractal that I wanted to try on Arduino: the Newton fractal. It's named after Isaac Newton's iterative ...
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Snowflakes & Clouds
I haven't been working on larger projects for a while, so here's a couple of recent chips from the workbench ...
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Small Talk
Two years ago, I used an Emic2 module for a couple of TTS (text-to-speech) projects. Despite its flexibility (someone even ...
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VS1053 + Matrix keypad
The VS1053b is a popular chip, used in many MCU controlled audio projects. It surprises me that nobody seems to ...
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Internet Radio remote control
Several attempts to connect a display directly to the Esp32 Internet Radio made the radio unstable, so I decided to ...
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Keep streaming
While still in an early stage of research for my Internet Radio (previous post), I came across Ed Smallenburg's comprehensive ...
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Stream it!
The purchase of this versatile breakout board from Adafruit immediately made me put on hold all my ongoing projects. May ...
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15-Puzzle (part I)
Part I of this '15-Puzzle' project was writing a simple sketch that shows the puzzle in its solved state, then ...
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Smart Weather App
[work in progress...] Just got this nice Waveshare 2.9" e-Paper module as a present. It looks like an ideal display ...
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More fractals…
At the end of my exploration of the fractal-universe, I had my tireless Arduino Uno create a couple of 'classics' ...
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IFS fractals
The use of backtracking in my Pythagorean tree sketch made me realize that it can be useful for creating other ...
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Pythagorean Tree
This fractal was first drawn by Albert Bosman, a Dutch mathematics teacher. It takes its name from the right-angled triangles ...
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Maze generator & solver
Jamis Buck's instructive website inspired me to write a sketch that draws a random maze on a display. Next, it ...
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Game of Life (revisited)
In an earlier Game of Life post, I had my Arduino Uno simulate 'Life' on a modest 64x32 cell grid ...
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Swiss made in China
While working on my flight monitor project, I came across the inspiring blog of Daniel Eichhorn from Switzerland (aka Squix) ...
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What’s up? (finishing touch)
Today I finished my What’s up (flight monitor) project by adding touch functionality to the TFT display. Touching a plane ...
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What’s up? (graphical)
Going graphical was a logical step between my original text-based flight monitor and the final touch screen version. Here's the ...
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Real Virtuality (RV)
Just a thought that crossed my mind: in today's Virtual Reality, computers are used to simulate reality in a virtual ...
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What’s up?
Sitting on my balcony on a cloudless day, I can see airplanes passing by almost every single minute. Where do ...
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The Art of Programming
If ten years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking ...
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Game of Life
Conway's Game of Life is a nice demonstration of how simple rules can generate complex structures. It's also a great introduction to ...
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Audio Spectrum Analyzer
Finally managed to have my Arduino Uno 'spectrualize' audio on a 1.3" monochrome 128x64 oled screen. These small oled screens ...
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‘Simulution’
In this project, I'm going to simulate (on my Arduino Uno) a simple evolutionary process according to the 'survival of the ...
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Acoustic Bean Machine
A 'Bean Machine', also known as Galton Board, is a simple but appealing way to watch statistics at work. On their way from ...
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Knight’s Tour
The purchase of a simple 8x8 LED Matrix module recently triggered a new intellectual challenge. Looking for possible applications of 64 LEDs in ...
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Rotary Encoders
With my upcoming robot arm project in mind, I bought a couple of these cheap Keyes KY-040 rotary encoders. Guess they may come handy for manually controlling ...
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Count Down Clock
Just a simple Arduino project for the last day of the year: a Count Down Clock showing the time left ...
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Solar Tracker
[work in progress] Arduino project: have a solar panel find and follow the sun Many solar tracking projects use four ...
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Larry’s Page
With our famous 5-minute installation, setting up WordPress for the first time is simple. True, and within those 5 minutes ...
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Transporter
At the heart of Transporter is a "no compromise" attitude to component selection and electronic design. I bought my Tranporter ...
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Hello Knight Rider
This is my Arduino "Hello World" project, inspired by my TV set's please wait indicator (that reminds me of Knight ...
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Texas Instruments TI-58
It was only after 37 (!) years of service that my vintage Texas Instruments TI-58 programmable pocket calculator stopped working ...
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Just getting started…
Just getting started with WordPress, finding me a nice theme and some useful plugins ...
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