my recent reads..

LEAP#379 AS3935 Lightning Sensor

I first heard about the AMS AS3935 Franklin Lightning Sensor in Arduino for Ham Radio. They are available as modules with built-in tuned antenna, but are relatively expensive/rare. I finally got my hands on one to experiment with.

Since we have between 171 and 186 lightning days on average a year here in Singapore, with each square kilometer being struck up to 16 times annually, I’m expecting to have some fun with this.

Here’s a first step - exploring the programming of the module with the standard Wire library. So far so good!

As always, all notes, schematics and code are in the Little Electronics & Arduino Projects repo on GitHub hero_image


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LEAP#378 BJT Phase Splitter

Simple unity-gain phase splitter in a little breadboard-compatible package. It uses a common-emmiter amplifier with a gain of -1.

As always, all notes, schematics and code are in the Little Electronics & Arduino Projects repo on GitHub hero_image


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LEAP#377 DIY Nokia 5110 Shield

Wiring it up a Nokia 5110 display every time I want a little LCD output is getting a bit tiresome. I have a spare prototyping shield, so A + B = a handy thing to have lying around for the next time.

As always, all notes, schematics and code are in the Little Electronics & Arduino Projects repo on GitHub hero_image


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LEAP#376 Piezo Vibration Detector and BPM Counter

I’m experimenting with some piezo transducers (sensors) to capture physical taps as a beats per minute measure with a microprocessor. All the filtering and debouncing of the raw piezo signal is done onboard the ATmega328 using a combination of:

  • analog comparator interrupts
  • filtering based on musical assumptions
  • exponential averaging

The result is a BPM between the threshold of the perceptual present and too fast to be useful.

As always, all notes, schematics and code are in the Little Electronics & Arduino Projects repo on GitHub hero_image


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