Hardware Tinkering
Falling down the Arduino rabbit hole, discovering ESP8266, the smart home journey from SmartThings to Home Assistant, and never looking back.
"So far, it's just simple stuff, blinking LEDs, moving servos. I'm learning and then turning around and teaching." — @jeff_lamarche
C’mon, don’t be such a tease — tell me more! I’ve been chomping at the bit to find the right Arduino project.
Having way too much fun with sensor data from my house.
I managed to turn a zwave switch on/off with Objective-C code that I wrote, and an Aeotec Z-Stick. Where’s my IoT nerd award?
I got my first Raspberry Pi this week, and I’m fucking amazed at this little itty bitty computer. #LateToTheParty
Like, I can’t stop ordering packages of breadboards and resistors and wifi chips on breakout boards and jesus someone stop me.
"I haven't tried the Feather yet. Looks like a lot of fun." — @GrouchoDuke
It’s a killer little form factor! Attached to perfboard w/ headers. This is ESP8266 w/ wifi.
Just googled: “how to write arduino code that isn’t horrible”.
With all this Arduino hacking I’ve been doing — I’ve been browsing lots of C++ parts of the internets. Nerds can be fucking jerks!
Lesson learned: if you OTA update an arduino with bad firmware, you’re kinda screwed.
It’s less ambitious than it looks, really. First thing I made outside of breadboard experiments at the dining table.
Fun day at the Maker Faire with the family!
Crimping/attaching JST connector pins is probably my least favorite thing to do in hobby electronics.
I’ve been using Atom in conjunction with PlatformIO recently, for IoT / Microcontroller tinkering. But I have to say, while Atom is a fine text editor, it makes for a rather terrible IDE.
The Feather Huzzah ESP8266 is my go to board for nearly every project I start. Recently picked up a couple of the 32’s to see if I should start using them instead.
A friend asked what platform to start with for hardware tinkering
Arduino, I started with a SunFounder starter kit with some sensors and stuff. Quickly moved on to buying way too many things from Adafruit. Most of my projects now start with an Adafruit Feather ESP8266. Small, powerful, and WiFi enabled.
The tooling for embedded systems is uh, interesting. Console log debugging FTW! I also use PlatformIO, but switched from Atom to Visual Studio Code and I’m much happier.
I can’t express enough how awesome I think Adafruit and SparkFun are for learning. Not just the blogs, but all their open source hardware designs are awesome.
Siri Shortcuts will almost certainly encourage me to hook my smart home stuff back into HomeKit.
I’ve had a lot of fun with various Arduino compatible projects, but I’ve tended to use phones as UI. I’m now tackling my first hardware project where a UI is part of it, and here I am turning to Android.
A friend was asking about getting started with hardware development
It took like 5 seconds to get a Hello World app on the device. Much MUCH faster than my Arduino efforts.
I’ve been doing a lot of arduino programming lately — and I almost kinda like C++.
I’ve been wondering why everyone has been talking so much about electronics lately. Apparently GND stands for Green New Deal and NOT Ground.
If you want to hack on a raspberry pi with Swift, and use Balena to deploy your projects — this project will sort you right out!
"Wink has been pretty nice, but I'm waiting for the dreaded email about them shutting down." — @drunknbass
Have you considered Home Assistant? I moved fully off of SmartThings 6-8 months ago, and haven’t looked back.
Hey Adafruit — good thing I hadn’t planned to use more pixels downstream of this.
Btw everyone, Adafruit is amazing, and their quality is generally top notch. Hobby electronics just requires a little diligence. You know how many parts I’ve received direct from China with reversed polarity connectors?
I have like 3-6 interesting (to me) coding projects I’d like to work on this evening. I should have planned my Christmas electronics hacking a bit better.
"Started playing with Home Assistant recently. So cool!" — @soffes
HA is insanely cool. I watched its progression until it was stable enough. Probably a year and half ago I dumped SmartThings and went full Home Assistant. Couldn’t be happier.
I’ve been tinkering with a lot of Arduino -> microcontroller -> custom boards etc over the last few years, and I can appreciate the journey! It’s super cool as a hobbyist that it’s so accessible.
A friend discovered AliExpress for the first time
Great deals as well as obscure and hard to source items. AliExpress is an electronics nerd’s dream!
When we moved earlier this year, I gained a home office as part of my transition to permanent WFH. So I plan to slowly build out a tinkering workspace indoors as well, for electronics, 3d printing, etc. It’s nice to be able to separate that from garage construction workspace.
We often talk about today’s increased “computing power” in the context of going to the moon — but I think that severely understates the profound difference in overall construction of electronics. Look at how crude some of those connections look!