Electronic Enthusiast

I'm Nicolas Lefebvre, and I'm an electronic enthusiast. In this blog, you'll fine my creations. "Programming is like 90% copy/paste and 10% actual programming. "

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Got my new PIC16F18446 dev. Board! It's so tiny!

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I’ll take some time to send the Gerber files to a manufacturer. This is the RS485 Prop Controller. In an Arduino Shield-like form factor, this little thing will allow me to put up to 32 microcontrollers on the same RS485 network. The shield can control a load (Up to 24VDC at 1Amp), play MP3 files on a SD Card (Up to 255 files, 32GB Max) and has SPI, I2C, Analog and Digital GPIO’s (Arduino’s Pins, basically). It has 2 RJ45 ports, to put each one of them in series on the RS485 bus.

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Serial Communication over RS485, passing through a 30meters cat5 wire! #rs485 #arduino #communication #electronics #diy #led #programming #prototyping

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Today I purchased my first PIC32 development board ! It’s the Curiosity PIC32MZEF Development Board. I’ll be able to apply everything I learned during my PIC Programming courses. Can’t wait !

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Programming the MQTT Broker #iot #electronics #coding #arduino

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So today I learned how to import files to the laser cutter and to operate this beast! How cool is that?!

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My first pneumatic project, my first air cylinder! Still waiting for fittings and my 5/2 Valve..

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Today I took 2 hours of my time to try EasyEDA, and I made my first Arduino Uno Shield. This is my Arduino MP3 Trigger Shield ! It takes a digital input (from 12 to 3.3V) as a trigger for up to 255 sounds. For the duration of each sound, we are only limited by the SD card capacity (32GB) ! It has a Class D amplifier, an optocoupler (for the 12 to 3.3V trigger option), an audio output for one 3W 8Ohms speaker and headphone jack. Oh and also 2 buttons to control the MP3 player manually. I’ll try to route the traces neatly tho.. It’s a bit messy.

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Mesmer: Beyond Animatronics - This is a dream job. So much technology, so much sensors and actuators, combined into a single piece.

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ESP8266 connected to my MQTT broker, as well as my Raspberry Pi!

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No microcontroller needed 😎

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Quick project! This is my MQTT controlled Latching Relay. The MQTT broker is my Raspberry Pi. I use it via SSH through my Linux. That way I can control everything from a single screen! To activate the relay, I publish a boolean command in the right topic on the broker (in this case, test/relay). I'll connect several of these modules (ESP8266) to the raspberry pi broker (Mosquitto).

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Next project coming soon !

I’m currently working on a project that will allow several microcontrollers (up to 32) to communicate between each other on only one data bus. I’ll be using CAT 5 wires, RS485 standard and my own communication protocol ! Coming soon :).

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Final project.

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A red LED matrix display, controlled by Bluetooth. Just turn it on, download a Bluetooth terminal on your Android Smartphone, connect to it and there you go ! Send any message you want (255 char. max). Controled by an Arduino Nano. It uses the HC-06 Bluetooth module and two Red LED matrix with 74hc595 chips.

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Final project.

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Today I played with my new XBEEs, some Neopixels and the TCS34725 color sensor from Adafruit ! One XBEE is configured as an End Point (the one with Neopixels), the other as Coordinator (color sensor). After each reset, the arduino Coordinator reads the value from the color sensor and send 3 bytes to the Arduino End Point (byte 1: red, byte 2: green, byte 3: blue). Then, those 3 bytes are sent to the Neopixel strip to be displayed as mixed colors !