Media - esp32 - Page 2 | virtualwolf.org

A photo of a plastic box with a "PiicoDev Starter Kit" sticker on the front showing several small blue circuit boards connected together with wires. It's got various sensors and cables in it that you can use to hook up to a MicroPython board and generally do little electronics projects with.

New toys!

...that need to get packed away now because they're a birthday present. #FirstWorldProblems

Posted on 8 April 2024, 13:43

A screenshot from my Grafana dashboard showing two "gauge" type panels, one for the dew point and one for the atmospheric pressure.

I did a bunch more hacking on my ESP32 sensor reader code today, deployed the new BME280 into "production" outside, and got my Grafana dashboards updated! And I was able to do it completely successfully without needing to actually plug the ESP32s into my computer to update anything, the remote-updating code worked a treat.

The new sensor is remarkably close to what the Bureau of Meteorology is reporting: the sensor says it's 17.5˚C, 95% humidity, dew point of 16.6˚C and atmospheric pressure of 1017hPa, versus the BoM that says the temperature is 17.8˚C, 94% humidity, dew point of 16.8˚C, and atmospheric pressure of 1019hPa.

diy screenshot nerd shit esp32 grafana

Posted on 5 April 2024, 21:50

A photo of a small microcontroller board hanging from the side of my laptop, with four thin cables going from some of the pins on it into a single small connector that's connected to a very small square circuit board that is the temperature sensor. There's red heatshrink around where the cables are joined, and there's a second one of these connector-to-separate-cable, well, cables sitting unplugged on the desk as well.

Tonight I did a bit of soldering for the first time in a while!

My shiny new BME280 temperature sensors have this very handy relatively standard four-pin connector on them for use with I2C, but ESP32 boards I'm using (the HUZZAH32 from Adafruit) don't have it and only have standard bare headers. So I took one of the cables with the new connector on both ends, chopped it in half, chopped four of the separate female "DuPont" connectors I already had in half as well, and soldered them together, and bam, easy connection!

our house diy darkroom esp32

Posted on 4 April 2024, 21:45

A photo of a small blue circuit board that's hanging by its wires from a piece of wood that's attached to the side of our back room. Towards the end of the wood there's also a blue box with a little fan vent in it (a Plantower PMS5003 air quality sensor) and a small white plastic enclosure that houses the existing DHT22 temperature/humidity sensor. And at the VERY end is my extremely dodgy solution to avoiding getting the sensors wet: a plastic tupperware that I've screwed into the end of the wood so it shields the sensors.

And we're alive!

That was quite straightforward, I found a MicroPython library for the BME280 and updated my sensor code so it can use either the DHT22 or the BME280. And as a fun additional point, the BME280 library also calculates the dew point based on the current temperature and relative humidity!

I don't have it running "in production" yet, I've just got it hooked up to a spare ESP32 and it's sending its data to an MQTT broker running on our Mac mini so I can keep an eye on it for a while, but it's very interesting comparing the values between the two sensors... right now the DHT22 says it's 20.2˚C and 94% humidity outside, the BME280 says 19.9˚C but only 71% humidity. I also want to get a better enclosure for the whole setup as well, I'll think I'll ask a friend who has a 3D printer to print me out one of the multitude of Stevenson screens that seem to be out there.

our house diy darkroom esp32

Posted on 3 April 2024, 20:02

A photo of three small dark blue printed circuit boards, two are BME280 temperature/humidity/atmospheric pressure sensors and one is a splitter with little connectors on all four sides, plus a selection of cables.

Yessss, new (small) project time!

our house darkroom new toys esp32

Posted on 2 April 2024, 15:03

A photo of three ESP32 microcontrollers. They're teensy little circuit boards, roughly 5cm in length and 2cm in width, festooned with electronic components, and with two rows of pins coming out of them on one side for plugging things thing.

I'd wanted to order a handful more ESP32 microcontrollers from Adafruit a few months ago, but they were entirely out of stock so I put my email address in to be notified when they were available again. A couple of weeks ago I got an email saying "The Feather HUZZAH32 is back in stock! There are 2997 available."

I... think that might be enough, haha. I ordered three and they arrived today. One of the things I want to do is to rig up a physical button that will turn off the LCD displays that are attached to the Raspberry Pis in the lounge room which display the current temperature inside and out, as well as the time. Even though we run them at a significantly-lower-than-maximum brightness, they're still very bright when we turn all the lights off when we're going to sleep. They automatically turn off at midnight and come on at 8am, but sometimes I want to turn them off earlier, and also occasionally I'm up before 8 in the morning and instead of the temperature and time I'm greeted with black displays.

Should be a fun little project!

our house diy darkroom new toys esp32

Posted on 6 September 2022, 21:50

I made an LED go blinky and fadey! (This is attached to my ESP32 running MicroPython because I'm more familiar with that than C++ on an Arduino.)

our house diy video esp32

Posted on 17 July 2022, 11:41

A photo of two small circuit boards with various chips on them.

Woohoo, my two extra ESP32s arrived, and just in time for my four-day weekend! Going to be doing a bunch of mucking around with MQTT.

our house diy darkroom new toys esp32

Posted on 30 September 2021, 11:11

A photo of an e-ink display with a blocky pixel font, showing the current outdoor and indoor temperature and humidity.

There we go, my ESP32/e-ink setup is done! This one is living in the office so we can see the current outdoor and indoor temperatures at a glance.

I chucked the code up on Codeberg because there was a bit of trial and error involved. This is using CircuitPython not MicroPython, and there're fewer resources available and fewer people using it, it seems.

our house diy darkroom esp32

Posted on 31 July 2021, 23:35

A photo of two small microcontrollers and a 2.9" e-ink display.

A photo of one of the two microcontrollers attached to the back of the e-ink display. The soldering for the headers is a bit slapdash and definitely not any sort of uniform neatness.

My additional ESP32 bits arrived today as well! I had to solder the headers onto the ESP32-S2 myself, and while it's not an amazingly neat job, I think it should get the job done.

our house diy darkroom esp32

Posted on 30 July 2021, 16:44