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

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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After my last post here work got crazy busy and I had no time for electronics for many months. The auto-watering system never went any further (yet). In my business it happens routinely. The past few months I'm finally somewhat caught up for a while and have had some time for futzing around with mic...

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Long time since last post. Other hobbies get in the way, and in my tiny house my electronics bench gets buried.

I bought a Wemos D1 Mini with MicroPython as part of a toy order from universal-solder.ca. Universal Solder is a Canadian company, which I like to support. They have a pretty good sele...

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