Engineer In Wonderland

A friend of mine is turning a commercial van into a campervan – an epic undertaking if you have never done it before. It now has a shower cubical, but finding a way to heat the shower water effectively is proving complex – so if you know an answer already, please reveal all below in the comments. People seem to ...

Short of employing Bletchley Park to discover the instruction set of the decades-old Aardware weather station that a school is trying to resurrect, it looks like a hardware refresh is in order. The anemometer, wind vane and tipping bucket rain gauge all seem to be of high quality and have come through all that time on the roof battered, but ...

So, does the ancient Aardware weather station work? Well, yes, after a fashion. The wind vane, it transpires, operates with three reflective optocouplers (97-002 types) staring up at white lines on a black surface giving a Gray-coded three bit output to divide wind direction into eight. There is provision for a fourth (see the link in its place), which would ...

After a freezing few hours in the workshop, some facts have been gleaned about the Aardware weather station. Firstly, it is well made – even after  30 odd years on a roof the microcontroller seems to be active once power is applied. Secondly, despite conformal coating, corrosion has eaten away some bits I have only a few photos as the ...

Raspberry Pi’s microcontroller, the RP2040, has some unusual features. And one of these is the i-o state machine, of which there are eight. spread over two ‘PIO blocks’ – (one shown right). According to the RP2040 data sheet, the four state machines simultaneously execute programs from a shared instruction memory. FIFO data queues buffer data transferred between PIO and the system. GPIO ...

A plea has arrived here from a school trying to resurrect the weather station installed on its roof. It has not been working for years. The hardware was made by Aardware Design – of Walton on Thames at the time, it appears. They seek: knowledge of the sensors circuit diagrams operating instructions a list of command/instructions a description of the output ...

I am going to make a guess that crypto-currency mining is the most selfish activity on Earth. Essentially, it is burning precious energy resources to calculate numbers for the benefit of some tiny tiny fraction of the world’s population. Ok, it is all very nice having a secure way to store certain data. But I can’t possibly believe it can be ...

An odd thing happened to me on a bicycle ride recently – I got a puncture, then another puncture half an hour later in the replacement tube. After at least one round of misdiagnosis, I worked out that the tyre was creeping around the rim, taking the inner tube with it, and the tube was then tearing by the valve ...

Arm is working on a 65nm low-voltage low-power Cortex-M33 processor called Mono, and it needed a low-power voltage reference to detect when the battery is getting low – Mono is for battery-powered sensing nodes, it has been demonstrated keyword spotting from a single alkaline cell at 1classification/s. The spec is: Cortex M33 CPU with DSP and SIMD extensions 128kbyte ROM 16kbyte SRAM ...

Having bought a little CNC router to make pcbs and learn a little about programming such machines, like many before, I have become obsessed with getting a little more out of the mechanics. Some of the problems are slack in and around the bearings, back-lash in the screw drives and flex in the mechanics. Trying to put some numbers on ...