Category Archives: Electronics

Post Bag – Saturday 9th May 2015

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I order a lot of odd items, mostly electronics related, from eBay. @WrathZA gave me the idea to start documenting what arrives and when for those of you who are curious about what you can get, the quality of the items and how long these items take to get here.

Today I had 14 parcels (originally thought it was 11 until I saw a few got stuck together) all arrive at once at the post office, this is a new record for number of parcels in a week and I assume has a lot to do with the recent problems with international shipping and the SA Post Office.

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ESP2866 ESP-07 Wifi Module

Aside

esp2866 My ESP2866 wifi module arrived, this particular module is nice as it has most of the GPIO pins available. By default the module has a serial interface that makes use of AT commands sent from your microcontroller to use Wifi, personally that seems a bit of a waste as the module has a nice powerful CPU built in.

RFduino – Adventures into the world of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)

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A quick write-up on the rfduino which arrived yesterday.

The rfduino started life out as a kickstarter project to make it easy for hardware tinkerers like myself to get access to BLE and incorporate it into our projects.

rfduino pictured next to an SD card for scale.

My rfduino pictured next to an SD card for scale.

It consists of a Nordic Semiconductor nRF51822 chip, support circuitry and Bluetooth chip antenna all on a nice tiny board. The nRF51822 contains a custom boot loader written by rfduino which when combined with an add-on to the Arduino IDE allows you to code for the device as if it was an Arduino device. This means you don’t need the Nordic Semiconductor development kit or API’s but does limit what you can do with the nRF51822 slightly.

What’s the big fuss with BLE you ask?

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