Making

Mesh radio After my last round of testing on the window sill, I realized we need to talk about how these radios actually talk to each other. Mesh radio is basically just small devices passing notes across town, bouncing the signal until it reaches the right person. The two main firmwares we use right now are Meshtastic and Meshcore, and they handle [...]

I only found out about a couple of guys working with mesh networks because they hopped into the local maker space discord, which immediately caught my eye. It turned out they were forming a new nonprofit focused entirely on mesh radio, so I decided to tag along to the first official founding meeting for the JKPG mesh group, the exact same crew that [...]

As previously mentioned I did som exploration of ESP32 mesh functionality and RGB leds for a project involving the local maker space where i failed to force mesh node status. After I gave up on that idea I managed to create som fun stuffs with the LEDs instead. The code is available here First iteration was to just have the LED blink in a chosen [...]

The local makerspace has a project for an upcoming light parade that will be held in the old ex-industrial area where we have our space. The idea is to have a bunch of ESP32 devices meshed together with RGB LEDs creating synchronized effects across the parade route. To make this work, I needed some nodes to always be root nodes (connected to the [...]

I have previously posted texts regarding my adventures in RGB-panel land, first here, and then here. To make the office a bit extra Christmassy this year i decided that I wanted to display some scrolling text (no problem at all) with emoji (great problems). The fonts supported by drivers for these panels have letters, and just the boring ones, not [...]

We have a cage for rabbits that we has small plastic hasps that somehow have a tendency to disappear. So on request from my wife I created a handful new ones. Original (white) vs. 3d-printed (green) After a couple of minutes in Fusion360, and 15 minutes in the printer we had a result, and it worked as well, if not better, than the original. Fusion [...]

For one of my children I created a small sign that said Roblox and I really liked the aesthetics of it so I created a larger version with built in light. From the start I maximized the size of the letters according to the printable volume on my 3d-printer. But the printing took ages, and it was close to 400g material per letter so I scaled it down [...]

In our office we have a suspended ceiling that we wanted to attach stuff to. Firstly we wanted a curtain rod to partition off a bit of the open plan. And later two small lights for a disco ball! First version, intended for curtain rod The first version worked quite well for the curtain rod, a couple of the small hooks got broken off but I made plenty [...]

After three [1, 2, 3] Ursa inspired keyboards it was time to try to do something different. For a while now I've seen several keyboards inspired by the original C64 design and colours, but I wasn't a Commodore guy, I had an Atari STe when I was a kid. The first ideas and sketches started to form properly around the start of the year, but it would [...]

I have a handful of cheap ESP32 development boards, and some expensive, that all sometimes gives me the error A fatal error occurred: Could not open COM6, the port doesn't exist. But I have found a workaround. The simplest way I found is to start with opening the Serial Monitor (in Arduino IDE) to see the status of the com-port easily. Then unplug [...]

Gets started with Meshcore

Meshcore in Jönköping

Success with ESP32 Mesh

Problems with Forced Mesh Node Status in ESP-IDF

LED-Scroller with Unicode support

Cage hasp

Boxy light sign

Dropped ceiling attachments

Atari ST inspired keyboard

Arduino – The port doesn’t exist