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Fermenters Friend: Using the CheeseBoard for Brewing Temperature Monitoring

Posted by Matthew Little on

This blog post covers a temperature unit using the CheeseBoard to monitor temperatures both on the screen and online. The LEDs are used to show over or under temperature. Data is streamed through the internet and can be monitored online anywhere. Read more

Adding Headphones to Our Bat Listener

Posted by Matthew Little on

Adding a headphone output socket to the bat listener has been on my list of things to do for far too long! It turns out it's quite simple to do. Replacing the speaker with a 100 ohm to the left and right channels of a headphone jack socket. The output is mono, so the same output goes to both ears.... Read more

Trying out the Program-O-Tron

Posted by Matthew Little on

The Program-O-Tron was a Kickstarter product from Proto-Pic, an online microcontroller and kit supplier. It costs £54 to buy now and is available from their online store. I thought it would be really useful for programming the microcontrollers included in some of my kits (mainly the ATTiny85 and the ATMega328). It comes as an almost complete board (SMD has all... Read more

Quotation Machine using the CheeseBoard

Posted by Matthew Little on

Setting yourself a small challenge in the form of an interesting project is a great way of learning - even if it involves a fair bit of failing! I set myself a weekend challenge of using our CheeseBoard ESP8266 development board to obtain and display some data from a website using a wifi connection. My original challenge was to show... Read more

Trying out the Cheeseboard:Cheddar

Posted by Matthew Little on

An overview of getting started with our cheeseboard for the first time. Read more

Solar Motor Controller Prototyping

Posted by Matthew Little on

Following on from our 'Solder Solar' we wanted a simple, low cost circuit that will use solar power to drive a motor. This post is a little bit of information about the design process, testing and the producing a circuit that does this. Problem We want to run a small motor using solar power. The problem is that the motor takes... Read more

Soldering is Easy!

Posted by Matthew Little on

As all our kits need to be soldered together, we have been asked a number of times about soldering education and information. We usually point people to the excellent 'Soldering is Easy' comic produced by Mitch Altman, Andie Nordgren and Jeff Keyzer. This is a really great comic-book style introduction to basic soldering techniques. This guide is visual, easy to... Read more

Bat Listener, Arduino and display!

Posted by Matthew Little on

Following on from our previous post on connecting the Bat Listener kit to and Arduino, here we show you how to add a small LCD screen to display frequency data and a 'sonograph'. Hopefully you have the Bat listener connected to the Arduino and are reading data onto the serial port. The next step is to add a small display... Read more

Connecting the Bat Listener to an Arduino

Posted by Matthew Little on

If you would like to take your bat detecting further, the new version of our Bat Listener has output pads for connecting the output to an Arduino. This means we can measure the exact frequency and start to do more interesting things like recording the frequencies, displaying a 'sonograph' of the detected signal and record the number of bat detections.... Read more

EMF Detector Workshop @ Nottingham Hackspace

Posted by Matthew Little on

I recently ran a workshop building the EMF Detector kit at my local hackspace in Nottingham. This kit responds to electric and magnetic fields to produce weird sound-scapes of a hidden world of electro-magnetic noise.   We tested it on phones, power supplies and electrical fittings. Always good to run through kits and instructions as people build them - a... Read more