I decided I wanted to play with shift registers, and the classic circuit for that is running a bunch more LED’s from a chip than the chip has pins, so I decided on an 8 pin ATtiny85 running 16 LED’s as a Larson scanner (Knight Rider or Cylon effect).

I started out on breadboard which was a terrible mistake as I ended up needing two breadboards to provide enough space to run 16 LED’s via resistors all with a shared GND. Should have gone straight to perfboard (I think veroboard would have the same problem as breadboard due to solid tracks instead of pads).

I’m thinking of making a soldering microscope from a Raspberry Pi (either a spare B+ I have or maybe a ZeroW). I had looked at Andonstar ADMSM201 or Lapsun 14MP HDMI 180x scopes, but they each have their limitations – crap software, tiny focal length requiring additional lenses, £200+ pricetags…..

So looking at it, I just have to buy a Pi camera module with a CS mount and a decent lens. Then I can either stream the display or plug into a HDMI monitor. Even without a Barlow lens I should get at least 20cm working area beneath the camera.

I’ve wasted about three days trying to get OTA upgrades to work on my ESP8266 boards. They take 1-2 OTA’s and then don’t even boot into the sketch. Tried my Gizwits WiFi Witty and ESP12F on a breakout board with an LDO as described in my earlier post. Then I tried my old NodeMCUv2 board and it worked fine, all of the time.

Turns out we need moar powah!

The HT7833 LDO on the white breakout boards from the earlier post, are supposed to be able to put out 500mA so I guess its not a current problem but a voltage one, when measuring what gets through to the ESP its just over 3.3v. I bypassed the LDO and fed a 3.7v LiPo to VCC and it works fine now!

Inspired by this Reddit post, I decided I’d have a go at making a soldering board with helping hands.

The bill of materials is over £10, but I’ve bought more than I need, so probably under a fiver for the build:

• Crocodile clips, 10 for 83p
• Oil coolant pipes, 10 for £3.83
• Silicone mat, £1.50
• Epoxy, 90p
• Anti-skid pads, 125 for 90p
• Sandpaper, 25 sheets for 90p
• 3:1 sticky heatshrink, 5 metres for £1.49
• 12mm wood bit, £1.29
• Two offcuts of wood, about 50x50x3cm from the local timber merchant, £1
• 10x banana plugs, 91p

Note that my local PoundLand was selling stuff for 90p for a few months, but its back to £1 now :-(

I just made a portable power supply out of a few components. I wanted something more flexible than my bench supply.

So the parts list is: TP4056, which can charge a LiIon or LiPo battery at the same time as powering a circuit from it, or USB. In powerbank terms it would be called pass-through. It also provides over [dis]charge protection but I don’t think reverse polarity protection (could be solved with a diode). I made another post detailing how to adjust the charge current, but I’ve left it at the default 1A for this project. I buy these in packs of five usually, they come to about 26p each.