Deid will give the Introduction to Pi presentation he gave to the OPCUG (Ottawa PC Users Group) last fall. It will be chock full of ideas for that Pi you have just laying around, or stuff in a drawer.
Electronics doesn’t have to be all tiny surface mount components that you can barely see. George will tell us about how to do electronics using bolt cutters this month.
Due to the current situation @ March 14, 2020, in-person meetings have been suspended until further notice. Please do join us on Slack or at our online learning sessions using Jitsi. Write to hello at vicpimakers.ca for invitations and information.
Q-CollegeSuite 303 771 Vernon Ave · Victoria, BC – 10am
1) Hack Challenge, by George Modify a window alarm to be a useful or entertaining device. Window alarms to be supplied free March 14th, one per attendee.
3) … bring projects that you want to share or need help with… If you like, email a description to be added to this page.
It is fun to repurpose battery powered consumer products. For instance, here is a Leak Detector made from a window alarm. The article includes the window alarm schematic.
And George made a bike theft deterrent alarm with remote radio alerting from the same window alarm.
In normal operation, the window alarm senses separation from its external magnet via its internal reed switch and feeds its piezo disk with an oscillation. The window alarm runs on 3 button cells and draws no current when the reed switch is open. There is also a slide switch to enable/disable the alarm.
Here is a photo of the circuit board: The OUT signal from the 8 pin oscillator chip is a 10V DC wave, pumped up by the inductor from 5 volts. A voltage divider can be added to lower this chip output signal to less than 5v to feed another device.
Deid successfully connected a 50 light string of addressable LEDs to an ESP8266 to cause the lights to light and change colour and move and …
Deid created the following patterns:
Primary
Random
Web Safe
Follow
Lead
Random On ***
All On
All Off
Rainbow
Moving
Colour
Christmas
Rainbow Group
Dual Colour *** *** Shown in the images
The ESP8266 C code to do this can be found here. Deid makes no representation that the existing code is good. In fact he knows some of it is not. Feel free to fix.
The challenge is to add more patterns and the code to implement the patterns. If you send Deid the code he will load and try the code. Unless someone comes up with a better way for folks to test remotely.
Using Nexus DR-S hat on your Pi to control your Amateur Radio. Nexus DR-X (aka: DigiLink) is a digital radio cross patch that allows you to link the Raspberry Pi sound card of your choice to nearly any amateur radio transceiver to enable perfect digital data communications.
The Buster RPI image includes a host of Ham apps and a simple dialog box that makes updating and installing your favorite programs easy. Deid’s presentation notes are here.