Since receiving the PCBs and successfully soldering the board together I have been trying to rewrite code for the I2C port expander. This has been immensely difficult! The Inkplate Arduino Library makes considerable use of an “Mcp” class, which is written to work with the MCP23017 GPIO expander IC. These chips are quite difficult to […]
The boards arrived! Amazingly within an hour of one another. Based on the experience I think that JLCPCB is a better value. With shipping OSHPark was $55.50 for 3 boards. JLCPCB was $26.36 for 10 boards. Aside from a higher cost OSHPark also left sharp bits of tabs around the edges of the boards which […]
Over the last week I rerouted the traces in my PCB design. Following feedback during class that the auto-router feature in Eagle isn’t very smart I did manage to make some cleaner routing manually. As part of the process I went through each component and made sure they were placed a closely as possible to […]
Designing this board took considerably more time than I anticipated. I thought I was in a good starting place by having two reference designs from previous projects that repurposed Amazon Kindle displays and controlled them with an ESP32, Inkplate 6 and EPDiy. My first hurdle was after realizing that both reference designs make use of […]
For my final project in Homemade Hardware I would like to iterate on a piece I started last Spring that was a combined project for Jeff Feddersen’s Energy class and The Nature of Code with Dan Shiffman. The concept for the project was to grow a virtual plant, using L-Systems, on an E-Ink display using […]
Over the last week I have made considerable of progress on my Solar powered fractal tree. Enclosure The bamboo plywood from Inventables arrived! Mai Claro, Daniel Ryan, Benjamin Moll, and a number of other ITP students helped to get me up and running for my first time on the laser cutter. I cut initially out […]
For my final project in The Nature of Code and Energy I am constructing a fractal plant, running on Arduino, that will reside on an e-paper display and be powered by the sun. Over the last few weeks I have made progress sourcing components and getting the basic circuitry assembled following my previous post with […]
Bill of materials The bill of materials for the solar fractal plant includes: Waveshare 5.65″ ePaper Module ($76) Voltaic 2 Watt 6 Volt Solar Panel ($29) Arduino Nano 33 IoT ($19) Lithium Ion Battery – 3.7v 2000mAh ($12.50) Adafruit Universal USB / DC / Solar Lithium Ion/Polymer charger ($10) 3.5mm / 1.1mm to 5.5mm / […]
This week I reproduced a fractal tree on an e-paper display using an Arduino Nano 33 IoT . Getting things working working in the Arduino IDE involved additional libraries including Geometry.h to allow working with points, rotations, and coordinate transformations. The Waveshare 5.65″ 7-Color e-paper display took some effort to get working but was helped […]
Virtual Plant Plants are responsible for doing a tremendous amount of work on Earth using sunlight to power their metabolic process. They have also been shown to have a calming effect on people and personally helped to lift my mood in an otherwise dreary NYC urban life. For my solar project I want to pay […]