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PCB Manufacturing, Prototyping & R&D in the Maldives

Custom ESP32-S3 development board — professionally manufactured by JLCPCB. A far cry from where it all started. It Started in a School Science Lab — Around 1998 Most people who get into electronics start with a kit, a tutorial, maybe a breadboard and some LEDs. I started by sneaking ferric chloride out of a school science lab to etch my first PCB. That was around 1998. I was living in the Maldives — a small island nation in the Indian Ocean — where there was no electronics supply chain, no maker community, no local PCB fab. Just a chemistry cabinet at school, a copper-clad board from somewhere, and a lot of curiosity. This post is about what the next 25+ years of PCB prototyping looked like from there. The early wins with proper chemicals, the years of improvisation when those chemicals disappeared, the real injuries, the failed boards, and finally — the moment JLCPCB changed ever...
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Pi Zero

After a long Que of waiting for Pi Zero,i have received it. The size of Pi Zero is very small and compact comparing to other versions of Pi. I am not going to give a review on Pi but since i like the Raspberry Pi. i would like to give some information on what i did to test its performance. For technical details go directly to raspberrypi.org.   Raspberry Pi Zero running RetroPie, just for a test.  For testing purposes i installed OSMC and test as a media player and i am happy with the performance. Later i installed RetroPie and check how the new hardware performed. RetroPie is cool that it enables to play almost all the retro games that we played when we were young. :) RetroPie running I am not interested of GUI so kept aside all the i candy parts and focused on controlling GPIO and runing python scripts and bash script for external hardware communication. Overall what i can say is the waiting for Pi Zero is not time wasting, Pi Zero is better and faster. Thumbs...
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Being away

Due to few technical and other issues i have been away from blogging my electronics project and experiments i do. Lets hope this start will be better than all the past years. I have few things which i would like to write some article that others get the benefit of. Few months back i got my Raspberry Pi Zero and did some cool things using it. Recently i am on to IoT stuffs so i cam across few new things for me, like MQTT and integration of hardware to MQTT server ruining locally. Possibilities are endless, i can make my light talking to MQTT server and it will handle rest by communicating the hardware like Arduino, ESP8266, Pi etc. I will detail one by one on my next post. Thank you everyone who support my blog and gain knowledge from my articles. Stay tune for more update from me.
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ESP8266 + DS18B20 Temperature sensor sends data to Thingspeak.com

Its been a while i was searching for a cheap wifi module and with the help of smart-prototyping.com , i was able to get a module almost less than USD 5. To connect the module to breadboard for prototyping, i made a small jig to interconnect with the board easily. So i can wire up the device and interface anything to GPIO's. Be careful with the module cause the device it powered with 3.3V and both UART side levels will be 3.3V so i recommend to use a FTDI converter with 3.3V level select.(one i used can select 3.3 and 5 volts) if you connect 5V the module will fry up. If you have 5V or 12V supply to power up the module i suggest to use LD1117V33 to make 3.3V. The stock Firmware in the ESP8266 supports AT commands and for communicating with this need an micro-controller like Arduino. But i want to make a simple solution for that without using external micro-controller. NodeMCU firmware was the best thing i found. To upload the NodeMCU firmware please do a google sear...
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My first Android App

Hi everybody, i have found a cool website to built Android applications in a split second. Yeah in seconds you can learn how to code for your android device. Since i am not a fan of Apple's products i will not talk about IOS stuffs. This is built by MIT and its one of the best product i found to develop for Android devices. Within few days i learnt the basic and later built an wonderful app to control my Bluetooth modules. This is how the coding looks like. Look how easy it is, just like a puzzle. For advance projects like these you need to refer to Android guide to know how some phone modules work with the command. Here is some pictures of my app. This a good and useful software for kids and schools. Instead teaching bullshit we can teach this to increase mind activities / practical involving others to learn coding for there daily use. For example i built this app to switch on/off light, you can built an app to monitor your plants health. This test is done...
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Solution for avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x00

Its been a while that i have noticed an error that sometime frustrates. When i first start using Arduino Uno and flash custom ATMEGA328P firmware i have faced tons of problems and each of them ease my work when i found a cause and solution for that. Most of Arduino users faced this and thousands of posts were in the forums related to avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x00 error. Some solutions in the forums are not much solved the issues. Earlier i faced this when i built a custom PCB with ATMEGA328P-AU. ATMEGA328P-AU  After flashing the firmware via ICSP (In circuit Serial Programming) Then i used FTDI serial to load the sketch. Finally the error occurs and the whole project came to a halt. Screen shot of Arduino IDE I have spent most of the time troubleshooting and found solutions for it. I will state what i have found, which cause this error normally. Wrong device selected from the IDE PCB/Circuit designing issues. FTDI module / Driver & ...
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My first Micro-controller program and this is how it was started.

I always have interest in electronics and i think in 1994 i got an physics book from some where that i don't remember now. Everyday after school i read it and got more interested on it even though i don't understand what its all about. Day by day small radios are disassembled and experimented how it works and able to fix the issues. When i was in grade eight till ten i don't have any interest in studying any subject that i feel useless. More and more focus to physics and math but 99% is always physics specially the electronics chapters. Couple of friends from school know that i know electronics some how and we share what we built and ideas. Those days Internet or PC is not available for me but a friend have i PC and i used to visit him and he knows some computer skills. we spent time on dial-up Internet in IRC. :) One day my physics teacher asked me do you like electronics? i said yes i do and i want to learn more. So he told if you love electronics i can help you t...
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Clover Display M302 hack

Its been a while i have this LCD and today i thought of connecting the LCD display to Arduino. Unfortunately i could not found any pin outs of this from any where and from the manufacture. Actually this is very old model which i got from old FAX machine and this display is a very cheap from online sources. Clover Display M302 PCB Ver 1.0 (16x2) which has 10 pin flat cable. After researching for a while from the internet i have seen in many forums people are asking for help on how to connect it and what is the pin configurations? so i thought of helping them as well as my self at the same time. After going through some of my old collections of Russian data of displays and things i found a basic diagram of how 10 pin LCD display configuration.  PIN1   - VSS PIN2   - VDD PIN3   - CONTRAST PIN4   - RS PIN5   - R/W PIN6   - ENABLE PIN7   - DB4 PIN8   - DB5 PIN9   - DB6 PIN10 - DB7 I tried these configuration...
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