Marc’s Blog: arduino – 2019: Using Open Hardware from my shirt to OS testing for Google’s Fuchsia
Here is my talk about my open hardware work over the years, with a good portion on LED hacking:
http://marc.merlins.org/perso/arduino/post_2019-01-24_Linux_conf_au-2019_-Using-Open-Hardware-from-my-shirt-to-OS-testing-for-Google_s-Fuchsia.html
I’m embarrassingly from an engineering school where I minored in electronics engineering, but I really spent all my time behind computers outside of the minimum required. Analog electronics always felt yucky in comparison (and the ‘compile time’ is horrible if you have to design boards and wait for them to be printed and mailed to you).
Anyway, these last 10 years, thanks to the open hardware miniconf at linux.conf.au, I got back a taste of working with (mostly digital) electronics through microcontrollers, although you can’t do digital electronics without any analog electronics of course.
This talk gives my journey through these last 10 years, what I learned and was able to build as a result. Many things are simple enough (hacked up power supply for my thinkpad, or multi voltage DC-DC charging station from solar panels), and anyone can do it without any electronics knowledge even. The talk gives some examples.
On the other extreme, the IoTuz board was a very nice ESP32 based board with a screen I spent over 100H writing drivers for. That was a great learning experience of low level programming, including compiler bugs with code generation and code alignment.
And then there are all the neopixels I got sucked into. That got a bit out of hands, but ‘bling’! 🙂
Slides with lots of links: http://marc.merlins.org/linux/talks/Using_Open_Hardware/Using_Open_Hardware.pdf
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm1jV_JRZHI
You can start around 20:32 for the LED work
Maybe this will be fun/entertaining to someone.