Tinker Niche

Handwritten Like Calendar  Intent: To make a unique calendar of my own. Handwritten Calendars look arty and it was chosen as a good calendar format. There was access to a CNC machine. A template file was created in Inkscape, the Vector Drawing tool and the month files generated. Had to add support for other fonts and the files generated were then converted to a format suitable for printing. Had to experiment with various fonts and styles and sizes to make it look good. A batch of 15 calendars were produced and physically processed by a Calendar maker. A Limited number of  copies of the 2023 calendar were generated It was made in two colors: ivory and card board style. It was well received by interested parties and all the calendars were sold out. Satisfying ! Next steps for new calendar might be: To automate calendar generation via an extension for Inkscape. Allow users to specify important dates and custom images Auto generate calendar for printing. The 2  types in ivory...

Adding Rudder Control to a Putt Putt or Pop Pop Boat   Putt putt boats or pop pot boats are inexpensive toy boats that are fun to use. They basically use a simple steam engine, a boiler that is mounted in the centre of a boat frame and when water is filled into the boat heater pipes and heated at the boiler, it causes steam to be expelled from one of the pipes which causes more cold water to be sucked in. The expulsion of the steam causes the boat to move forward and creates a suction/expulsion cycle. As the only motion that is provided is forward motion, it would be very desirable to have turn control. This is done by using a rudder. Implementing the Rudder Control on the Putt Putt boat This mechanism needs a rudder a piece of metal/wood/plastic and turns left or right depending on the control from the user. To achieve this mechanism, simple off-the-shelf parts or parts available from the numerous online electronics hobby stores were chosen. A simple SG90 servo can provide the lef...

Notable technical stuff from another of my Blog  The Old Blog is here  Aj's Old Blog   Custom Android ROM generation and new hardware interface for a Micromax Funbook for an interactive table for a Coffee Franchise Needed a new touch screen with deeper depth sensing to be interfaced to an android tablet. A hackable Android tablet was found and its hardware enabled to make changes. Cyanogenmod was a popular alternative Android variant. The CM10 Android ROM was compiled for 24 hours and its ROM updated to a stock Micromax Funbook (P300?) Google apps were also run separately. A different touch screen needed for this was interfaced to Android and was found to be working satisfactorily. The link to a related blog is Cyanogenmod 10 (Android ROM) on Micromax Funbook Howto build a tiny Home projector Needed to build a DIY projector  By taking apart the reflector backing from a phones display one can get transparency like film. Using a strong light and some proper lenses, a p...

Long time wish to build a smart watch. Experimented with various platforms, not built anything usable yet. Many opensource variants: watchy, openwatch, pinetime, etc. Pinetime is by the Pine64 Organisation  Pine64 Org . They make many open source products like laptops, phones, watches, SBCs, etc. The Pine64 forum has a watch called the Pinetime. It looks nicely packaged and so wanted to see if its suitable for everyday use. More info here  PineTime It is an NRF52 based chipset with an IPS display and chinese sensors for heart rate and step counting. They have an FreeRTOS based OS called the Infinitime . It was WIP then (Mar2021), so many features were under development and also the UI was rudimentary. At about the same time there was another micropython based OS called WaspOS which was under active development.  Downloaded this and generated the OS. The advantage is that one can just write micropython apps and download to this board. No classical embedded development nece...

  HOWTO make the OTTO STARTER BOT using components bought off the Internet. As there is an avid interest in building toys, opensource bots come in very handy. One such opensource bot is the Otto Bot. They have designed multiple versions of bots that can be integrated by kids and provided detailed information on their website  Otto Bot Website Designed by a toy maker basically uses off the shelf hobbyist components to build and program bots. One can learn to assemble the hardware, write code using a GUI like scratch or even use the Arduino IDE and also is extensible. The plastics are also open sourced and one can download and print them if there is a 3D printer available. There is availability of online 3d printed parts. After assembling the first Otto, a couple of other Otto kits were also integrated by interested parties (kids/adults) The default software collection comes with a Scratch frontend called Blockly. One can download it and examples for various hardware and emotion...

     As of December 2022 Semiconductor shortage has led to various companies searching for alternate options that are in stock or have longer term availability. One such example is the availability of Raspberry Pi, Toradex older versions, etc. MyIrtech has an extensive portfolio of such equivalents.  https://www.myirtech.com/ There was a need to support a client who needed a browser preferably chrome and apache and php. One requirement was to support serial port via PHP modules, needing the not actively maintained DIO module Why anybody would use serial port via apache definitely weird, but maybe the customer only had that as the default skill An NXP imx8 SBC MYS-8MMX was found to be suitable wrt the application needs.  Its an imx8 quad 1.8G cores and also a single 400 MHz microcontroller. 2GB DDR4 and 8GB emmc, with USB Host, NVME, gig E, WIFI/BT, MIPI CSI, LVDS/HDMI output, etc All for a cost of 100 USD. And with a 7 inch display would work out to say 20k INR ...

  The ESP32CAM is a super cheap IP streamable camera running off an ESP32 and an omnivision sensor like the OV2640. It is around 600 INR (2022). It would be cool indeed if it could do night vision too. A long time ago another webcam had been hacked to provide night vision capabilites. So there was a need to check if the ESP32CAM could also be similar converted to an IR camera. The advantage this would provide would be to have night vision with an IR light as is common in security cameras.  So the uses are many: security camera, trail camera and more importantly a camera with source available to change it to do anything. With help from the right contacts, the lens assembly was opened up and the relevant filters were removed. There was a problem in re-assembly as a small lens would keep falling off and would interfere with the image. It was solved by gluing the lens assembly. Below is a video showing the results of the enabling of night vision on ESP32Cam.  One can see that...