I finished my Arduino laser turret. Never did figure out why my bench supply seems to reset the circuit when connected to the veroboard but not the breadboard, but it works fine with 4x AA Eneloops, which at full charge give 5.26v Bill of materials came to this lot plus a 330ohm resistor and a 2N2222 transistor: WiiChuck, £1.40 for two Official Nintendo nunchuck (clones didn’t work), £9 for two Two SG90 micro servo’s, £2.

I don’t particularly like Lua, or the AT firmware from Espressif, so decided to look into native C code. As the “regular” SDK seems to be going more and more closed-source I decided to try the FreeRTOS-based SDK instead. So I setup the ESP-01 on the breadboard as shown. I’ve used a little adaptor to space out the pins – basically a 4×4 piece of stripboard with male headers (pins) on the outside pointing down and female headers on the inside pointing up to plug the ESP’s 8 pins into, with the traces cut down the middle – or joined using solder blobs if using perfboard.

I’m just waiting for a right angle USB cable – to connect the RPi’s A connector to the USB DAC’s B connector in my radio. I’ve built/tested my servo camera mount, just got to test it on the Pi (I used Arduino) and figure out how to mount the Pi’s camera to the bracket – probably a piece of wood with four screws. I’ve modified my RF24 weather station code to also transmit commands to an Arduino to blink an LED (or eventually fade an LED strip) based on Tweets, rather than just receive sensor readings.

I’ve recently been using VMWare ESXi 5.5 in anger – with real VM’s rather than just testing shell commands. Plus it seems the last couple of versions of VirtualBox can no longer run ESXi as a guest. Anyway, its soooo Windows-centric vendor-locked its unbelievable. I mean you can’t even load a bunch of ISO’s on a USB stick and put them in the back of the machine, you have to transfer them using the VSphere client over the network.

I seem to have a lot of electronics projects on the go which I’ve not got around to finishing. Just thought I’d make a post to help me remember my plans. Internet radio – need to finish the box. Also need to change the code to account for the new 20×4 LCD, maybe with custom play/pause characters. Maybe scrolling tweets or displaying the temperature from the weather station project or an internet API.