Biz Tech Arduino

Secret Serial Port for Arduino/ESP32

If you use the Arduino IDE to program the ESP32, you might be interested in [Andreas Spiess’] latest video (see below). In it, he shows an example of using all three ESP32 UARTs from an Arduino program. He calls the third port “secret” although that’s really a misnomer. However, it does require a quick patch to the Arduino library to make it work.

Just gaining access to the additional UARTs isn’t hard. You simply use one of the additional serial port objects available. However, enabling UART 1 causes the ESP32 to crash! The reason is that by default, UART 1 …read more

You Probably Don’t Want To Find This Toilet In Your Washroom

Ok, this one is a bit bizarre, but in perfect keeping with the subject matter: a talking toilet ripped from the pages of the Captain Underpants children’s books. Hackaday.io user [hamblin.joe]’s county fair has a toilet decorating contest and at the suggestion of their neighbour’s son, [hamblin.joe] hatched a plan to automate the toilet using an Arduino in the fashion of the hero’s foes.

Two Arduinos make up this toilet’s brains, an Adafruit Wave Shield imbues it with sound capabilities, and a sonic wave sensor will trigger the toilet’s performance routine when someone approaches. A windshield wiper motor …read more

Print A Flexible Keypad

[Micah Elizabeth Scott] needed a custom USB keyboard that wrapped around a post. She couldn’t find exactly what she wanted so she designed and printed it using flexible Nijaflex filament. You can see the design process and the result in the video below.

The electronics rely on a Teensy, which can emulate a USB keyboard easily. The keys themselves use the old resistor divider trick to allow one analog input on the Teensy to read multiple buttons. This was handy, but also minimized the wiring on the flexible PCB.

The board itself used Pyralux that was milled instead of etched. …read more