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.
2) Hack Challenge, by Deid
New “Christmas Light” patterns
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.
Or the piezo can be used as a microphone, providing about 100mv into a very high impedance input
In May we can show what we achieved.
New “Christmas Light” patterns
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.
Setup an IP Camera at the front door, and a Pi with a nice 7″ screen to see “who’s knocking”.
Hosted by 
A shallow Dive into Adafruit’s Circuit Playground Express
Jim’s presentation focuses on interfacing sensors and devices ( modules) to microcontrollers followed by actual examples. Two or more examples will be discussed using I/O from pulse inputs, IR transmitters/receivers, accelerometers, load cells, Bluetooth SPP and motion controllers.
Along with everything the Google Assistant already does, you can add your own question and answer pairs. All in a handy little cardboard cube, powered by a Raspberry Pi.
One of the many cool things you can do with your Raspberry Pi is to add a $30 DVT-T (
Discover the advantages of Power of Ethernet (PoE)! PoE is a technology that allows one to only run one cable to a distant device, just an ethernet cable. The distant device not only receives network connectivity, but also power from the single cable. This is good for small low power devices such as ESP8266 (embedded controller) boards. Hosted by Mark G. RSVP on 
Andrew will share with us his trials and testing with IP -based Cameras, and integration with the Raspberry Pi.
A presentation on creating a house monitoring device, with sensors, reporting via cell phone text interface. Pretty cool stuff.
Tuesday, November 21, 2017
You have seen Craig carrying around routers, but he has never shown you what is inside. In this session, Craig will show you the Open Source alternative to Router Software, which supports over 1000 router models. There is a good chance your router is supported by OpenWrt/LEDE.