I wanted to get a wireless adapter for the RaspberryPi.
Amazon had the right one, for ~$22, free shipping, pretty good deal. So I add it, shop some more then I get to check-out.
Suddenly I get this, and it doesn’t look like such a good deal anymore. Yikes:
In previous posts (here and here) I described my efforts and research to develop a DIY method to make good quality SMD metal stencils at home. I have since experimented some more and I believe I found the best method (so far) to do this with very cheap materials, yielding very good results.
Since transferring the toner to the soda can aluminum alloy was the most challenging part, I kept experimenting with different transfer mediums and other ways of possibly facilitating and perfecting the transfer.
Finally the solution is here: consistent, repeatable, “perfect” toner transfer, every time.
I uploaded an excel spreadsheet on Github with a table of achievable air transmission rates for the RFM12B radios, including code instructions for my RFM12B library.
You can tweak these to achieve better range or better penetration. It’s hard for me to provide specifics since in my case the default 38kbps works well. This guy on the jeelabs forum achieved much better reception by lowering the kbps to ~9kbps in his environment.
If you use this and get interesting results, I’d love to hear about it.
The first Moteino batch has just sold out!
Not too bad for 5 days since the store launch.
I ordered another PCB batch and more Moteinos are expected to be ready for shipping on Monday (Feb-18). Until then you can pre-order if you wish or just wait for more updates.
Thanks everyone for all the comments and support!
The Moteinos have an LED onboard. But it’s not on D13 as regular Arduinos, instead it’s on D9 (PWM pin, can be faded). I’d like the LED to flash when the bootloader starts and when Moteino is programmed from the Arduino IDE. So I rebuilt Optiboot for this purpose and all future orders for Moteinos will come with this tweaked Optiboot that will make use of the onboard LED when you reprogram it.
This is a video of how I program and test Moteinos before I ship them to you, also showing the updated Optiboot in action:
Some time ago I posted a youtube video describing how I read my water meter. This is a write-up about it and an introduction to WaterMote – a combination of Moteino and EE-SY310 photo reflective sensor breakout board. The PCBs for the SY310 sensor arrived and the product is available in the store.