futz f&ts v.i. To tinker experimentally; to change something just to see what it does

I bought a Sparkfun BOB-13884 LP55231 breakout board as filler on a recent Digikey order. The LP55231 is quite an interesting chip. It drives only 9 LEDs, but has a pile of capabilities. And with the onboard charge pump it does it all on low power and very efficiently. Way too much to type, so her...

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Most microcontrollers these days are 3.3 volt. I've been using plain old cheap 5 volt 1602 LCDs forever, but I got tired of always having to set up dual voltage to my breadboards. 1602 LCDs work fine with 3.3V signals, but the backlights are dim and the LCD is sort of faded at 3.3V. I know you can a...

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Today's little project was driving a Nokia 5110 LCD with the Black Pill board. The 5110 phone was introduced in 1998. The display is monochrome and resolution is 84 x 48 pixels. Pretty savage by today's standards. But they're cheap and easy to drive. Good for microcontroller projects.

I had some o...

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Ordered and received some W25Q128 chips from Digikey to give the Black Pill another 16MB of flash memory. First I soldered on the decoupling cap. The pads for the it are 0402. The smallest cap I had was a 0603. It fit - barely. Then I soldered on the chip. No problems. SOICs are easy. Here it is sti...

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I set up the Black Pill to drive a 1602 LCD with a PC8574T I2C backpack board.

I wrote a little MicroPython code for hardware I2C and... it didn't work. I beat my head against that wall for a long time. In the end, as far as I can find out from lots of online searching and trying a long series of...

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