The finalists

August 24, 2015

There was a tough road to get the 3x Portable Environmental Monitor beta prototypes to the Hackaday Headquarters in time, but the effort was worth it! With today’s official announcement, the project has advanced to Finalist in the Best Product competition, and to Semifinalist in the Hackaday Prize 2015 competition. Last year it was a thrill as well, with the uRADMonitor-A advancing to Semifinals. With this previous project spread all…

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Post Beta hardware iteration

August 23, 2015

For the Portable Environmental Monitor beta release, both the project summary and the system design document presented some of the things to improve next. The first PCB was fine, but there was a linear regulator wasting power, that had to be replaced. Also, new ideas needed more hardware changes. Here is another hardware iteration to implement all that. The new changes include: – power efficient Lithium battery voltage converter, using…

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A true hacker makes his own PCBs

August 6, 2015

A true hacker makes his own PCBs. Dual layer. And in the kitchen. Why so? Because doing them as DIY and not paying lots of money to some greedy company is some kind of hack. And if it wasn’t for all the issues I had with the Portable Environmental monitor along the road, I could have used the nice OSHPark voucher I won on Hackaday (Thanks again guys!). But I’ve…

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ESP8266 Troubleshooting

July 29, 2015

I got a few esp8266 modules back in 2014, shortly after they’ve been announced on HackaDay. I didn’t have much time for them, being caught with other projects, up until recently when the portable environmental monitor project needed a versatile wireless communication mechanism, low powered and if possible at a decent price. The esp8266 seemed the best candidate, but like with everything in life where nothing comes free, getting it…

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