Quotation Machine using the CheeseBoard
Posted by Matthew Little on
Setting yourself a small challenge in the form of an interesting project is a great way of learning - even if it involves a fair bit of failing! I set myself a weekend challenge of using our CheeseBoard ESP8266 development board to obtain and display some data from a website using a wifi connection. My original challenge was to show... Read more
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- Tags: arduino, Cheeseboard, esp8266, experiment, kits, new, wifi
Soldering is Easy!
Posted by Matthew Little on
As all our kits need to be soldered together, we have been asked a number of times about soldering education and information. We usually point people to the excellent 'Soldering is Easy' comic produced by Mitch Altman, Andie Nordgren and Jeff Keyzer. This is a really great comic-book style introduction to basic soldering techniques. This guide is visual, easy to... Read more
Bat Listener, Arduino and display!
Posted by Matthew Little on
Following on from our previous post on connecting the Bat Listener kit to and Arduino, here we show you how to add a small LCD screen to display frequency data and a 'sonograph'. Hopefully you have the Bat listener connected to the Arduino and are reading data onto the serial port. The next step is to add a small display... Read more
Connecting the Bat Listener to an Arduino
Posted by Matthew Little on
If you would like to take your bat detecting further, the new version of our Bat Listener has output pads for connecting the output to an Arduino. This means we can measure the exact frequency and start to do more interesting things like recording the frequencies, displaying a 'sonograph' of the detected signal and record the number of bat detections.... Read more
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- Tags: experiment, kits, new
EMF Detector Workshop @ Nottingham Hackspace
Posted by Matthew Little on
I recently ran a workshop building the EMF Detector kit at my local hackspace in Nottingham. This kit responds to electric and magnetic fields to produce weird sound-scapes of a hidden world of electro-magnetic noise. We tested it on phones, power supplies and electrical fittings. Always good to run through kits and instructions as people build them - a... Read more
Curious Electric at Cambridge MakeSpace
Posted by Matthew Little on
Recently, I headed down to Cambridge MakeSpace for a meet up of the the Cambridge Synthetic Biology group. The meet up was entitled "Science Makers: Open hardware for STEM education". They had previously ordered the bat listener kit and invited me along to chat about the kits I'm working on and also to hear and see what members of their... Read more
PCB design procedure...
Posted by Matthew Little on
Here at The Curious Electric Company, we use the open source PCB and schematic design package KiCAD. This keeps getting better and better, but, as with any software, has a (quite steep) learning curve associated. Here is the NEW version of the Bat Listener being worked on. We have listened to customer feedback and have tried to improve the kit... Read more