An application of Blue Board in calculating heat sink cooling capability, measured in Watts
By measuring the interior chip temperature over a few seconds of a chip cooled by a heat sink, you can calculate the watts dissipated by the heat sink. The DS18B20 measures temperatures up to 125℃ at the interior of the chip. This is a useful measurement If you are making your own heat sinks out of copper tubes or folded aluminum sheathing, You can also compare the effectiveness of different heat sink compounds this way.
The presentation is at this bookmark in a longer presentation on how to set up a Raspberry Pi Pico as a Blue Board learning tool. Blue Boards are available for free from George at 250-893-7423
Why just run your own video conferencing server, when you can simultaneously run that AND mail, calendaring, contacts, calls, IM, file sharing, remote backup, and a web-based office suite, all in one intimidating package. Get your own thrift-store Google G Suite going with the open source Nextcloud platform on a tiny Raspberry Pi! Great for the privacy-conscious, the independent, and masochists. We’ll do it the hard way and make configuring Jitsi look like recess at kindergarten (and then do it the easy way). Warning: the hard way will race through dependencies including Apache, PHP, MySQL/MariaDB and openSSL, so expect some mild suffering.
Share the projects you have been working on over the summer. This will be a hybrid show and tell using Jitsi, and in person at Quality Foods (up stairs)
We will be having a discussion about Projects that we are working on, but haven’t shared with the group. These can be projects that are successful or ones that just didn’t work out and have been abandoned. We’ll enjoy hearing about other’s projects, and perhaps even offer to help.
George will share his old man savers. Consumer kitchen appliances are designed for one size fits all, not for my personal needs. My needs change as I age, and I need alerts for faults.
I like to turn off my drip coffee maker as soon as coffee is brewed. If I forget, it wastes electricity (500watts) and spoils the coffee. If I forget to insert the carafe, I’ve got a mess. A timed relay with a contact sensor for the carafe solves the problem.
So as not to overcook the meat, I turn off my induction hot plate based on a thermistor inserted into the meat to trip a relay to power off the hot plate.
A centralized monitor and alarm system, with text message notifications, can be tailored to one’s specific needs. My monitoring system needs to include at least 9 sensors:
I decided to build my own Raspberry Pi music player using Python, as the available players didn’t really do what I wanted. This is Python at the beginner level, and the saga of making the player. Mostly it is about the little things in Python that caused me to stumble for a while. The music player is functional, the interface isn’t elegant, and I learned a few things about Python programming. – Don
Intro to Pi & Others Discussion. We will review the course materials, and discuss improvements, and getting the word out.
Intro to Pi & Others is a four part series with each session building on the previous sessions, where Pi basics of software and hardware will be explored.
Now that you have the world’s most useful project, it is time to package it up so the world doesn’t break it. We’ll discuss using different packaging containers to protect your project.
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.
