Cahamo's Electronic Adventures

I previously blogged about some Wi-Fi and HDMI cable related problems I had with my new Raspberry Pi 4B - here's the post . There's one more thing that I encountered while setting up the Pi that may be helpful to anyone in the same position as I was. The Raspberry Pi set up instructions explicitly say that you should set up the Pi using a wired USB keyboard and mouse, even if you intend to use wireless items later. When I read that my heart sank.  Somewhere there may be a wired USB keyboard / touchpad combo around the place, providing I didn't throw it out, but could I find it? Take a wild guess. So I plugged in my Logitech wireless dongle to one of the Pi's USB 2 ports and went for broke. It worked . Phew. That's a pretty good testament to how far Linux has come when, right from the off, it recognised and worked flawlessly with a wireless UK layout keyboard and mouse. There was a time when setting up peripherals with Linux was a nightmare for the uninitiated like m...

A few days ago I acquired a shiny new Raspberry Pi 4B. I got it to do my microcontroller programming with to save having to wrestle Windows into doing Linuxy stuff. I bought the 4Gb Pi along with the necessary power supply, HDMI cable and 32Gb SD card (with pre-installed  NOOBS ). Some heat sinks, a case, a fan and a fan controller completed the order with those nice people at the Pi Hut. In general this is an impressive piece of kit but I've encountered some problems with it that I thought I'd share in case I can help prevent someone else from tearing their hair out. About my setup It's relevant to what follows to point out the following: I use a stand-alone monitor with my laptop and share this with the Pi by means of an HDMI v2 compatible switch. A powered 4 way USB3 hub is plugged into one of the Pi's USB3 ports. There's a Logitech wireless dongle plugged into the hub that enables use of my Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse with the Pi. Each of the hub's ...

Yep, even before getting anywhere near completing my first project I've got an idea for a second. In my defence, they're both related. The idea is to construct a Theremin-like instrument. Theremin-like because my idea uses a slightly different principle to control it. So, what's a real Theremin? Briefly it's an instrument that uses radio waves to deduce the proximity of the player's hands to two aerials: one that controls pitch and another that controls volume. It uses the capacitance of the human body to determine the hand's position relative to the aerials. There's much more info on howstuffworks . My idea is to use the same capacitive sensing as is planned for my first project, the Electro Tongue Drum . But, instead of detecting an actual touch on a key I'm hoping to use the fact that the metal sensor can detect the proximity of a finger or hand. While a real Theremin uses radio waves to detect the position of the player's hand mine w...

The electro-what? If you've read my previous post you'll know I'm an amateur musician of sorts. I play guitar, fumble with keyboards and have a liking for weird and off beat instruments. Canjo anyone? One such instrument is the Tongue Drum (aka Tank Drum, aka Hank Drum). I fancied buying one, but a decent one isn't cheap, so I couldn't justify the cost given the small amount of use I'd have for it. But how about an electronic emulation of one? I got the idea when I was down the rabbit hole looking at lots of other peoples projects online. I stumbled across the paper piano project. The person who built this simply drew the keyboard on cardboard and filled in the keys with pencil "lead". Those "keys" were connected to a wire using a paper clip, of all things, and the wire was attached to an Arduino Uno micro-controller via a large value resistor. The Arduino can then sense when a finger touches one of the pencilled in keys and play a (horri...

 I'm starting out out learning about electronics at age 62, and it's all Pfizer's fault! Now I've got plenty of interests other than electronics: dog walking, playing the guitar, composing electronic music and programming in Delphi Pascal. (You can check those out on my music YouTube channel , my blog - Alo Phogg's Music Blogg , on Bandcamp and my programming site if you're interested). But I'm retired. I've got plenty of time and was feeling the need for a new hobby that was a bit different from the others. Eventually I settled on making a scenic diorama. I'd done one before about thirty years ago and thought I'd have another go. Having constructed a building kit I thought it would be nice to light it. So I went off and read about how to wire up LEDs, thinking I'd just wire a few to an old 12V DC power controller I have lying around. Well they were bright ! This brings us to April 2021 and it's where Pfizer come in. I'd just had se...

Welcome to my new electronics and micro-controller project blog. I'm a complete beginner at this game and I'm intending to use this blog to document my projects as grow. If that's of interest then please stick around. If you have any helpful advice for a newcomer, then please do comment away. I'll introduce myself properly in the next post .