HaleHound ESP32-DIV and CYD

I have been trying to get a ESP32-DIV running with an ESP32-S3 processor as is required.  So far, after days of trying, all I have is a blank screen.  I have also tried to make a FCFZ (Fully Compatible Flipper Zero) to no avail.  So, out of the blue, I thought I would try the HaleHound software to see what happens. https://github.com/JesseCHale  I was shocked as it worked on the very first try!  It uses an older ESP32 processor.  I did not expect it to work so I just set it up with jumper wires to test it.

Here is a back view of the jumper wires.  The touch screen was somewhat erratic.  I would like a CYD version with push switches for making selections.  

The screen wiring follows the CYD version but the touch screen uses different I/O pins.  In the CYD version the touch screen shares three pins with the LCD thus freeing three pins for other stuff.  

Here is a screen capture of the successful ESP32 programming screen.

Here is the wiring that I used for the jumpers:

DISPLAY PIN  -  ESP32 PIN

---------------------------------

1. VCC - 3v3

2. GND - GND

3. CS - GPIO15

4. RESET     - EN

5. DC - GPIO2

6. SDI(MOSI)    - GPIO13

7. SCK - GPIO14

8. LED - 3v3

9. SDO(MISO)  - GPIO12      

TOUCH    -    ESP32 PIN     -     CYD

-----------------------------------------------

10 .T_CLK - GPIO25     GPIO14

11. T_CS         - GPIO33     GPIO33

12. T_DIN - GPIO32     GPIO13

13. T_DO     - GPIO35     GPIO12

14. T_IRQ - GPIO34     GPIO36

Building a DIY ESP32-Div

I am building a ESP32-DIV to further my collection of Hacking devices.  I am building it on proto boards so I can change it later if needed.  Why not buy the prebuilt models?  For one thing those short cables between the NRF24's and the antennas have a huge loss.  I want them to go directly to the antennas.  For another thing I do not have that kind of money laying around.

Here is my planned layout.  I am using both sides of the board so the sockets are glued in place.

The instructions to upload the firmware are not very clear.  Here are screen captures of what I found and hopefully I got the correct files? This is my setup screen:

This is the instructions with my comments:

This is the text that appeared.  I do not know if it is correct!

After several days of trying to get this to work I concluded the probem is the LCD.  I searched the Internet and discovered that some ILI9341 LCD's are acturally ST7789 powered.  In fact I found an image of my exact same LCD and they had the same problem, it was a ST7789!

 Here are three projects that are on my desk.

Here are two documents I am working on

Here is the wiring chart for the ESP32-DIV

Wiring Multiple Baseboard Heaters

Recently I have some across several baseboard electric heaters that were wired together.  Usually they use the thermostat controlers that were designed to run only one heater or at the most two heaters.  The real solution is to use contactors.  These are heavy duty relays designed to hadle 30 amps or more.  You can have dual or tripple 30 amp breakers going to the contactor then have the heaters wired in groups of two, or three with 10 gauge wire, connected to the contactors.  This is a example of a system for running four baseboard heaters.

My brother contacted me about his heating sytem dying.  I discovered the the coil of the top contactor was shorted and the 24 volt transformer was fried. So I disiconnected it and he could just use the bottom contactor to power half of his heaters temporarily.  However the bottom one quickly died.  The coil on the bottom contactor had shorted as well. It turns out thse contactors were not the problem. (See update below) The coil gets so hot that it partly melts the coil form and then it shorts out.  The picture is of a three phase system, the three phases on the left and the heaters are on the right.
 

Another issue is that there is no schematic diagram of how to wire multiple heaters up.  Here is a simplified wiring diagram for up to six heaters.  Another contactor can be added for up to12 baseboard heaters.  On a three phase system you can use a tripple 30A breaker but then you need 20 amp breakers or fuses if you have smaller 12 gague wire going out to the heaters.  That setup saves room in your breaker box. 

I found the problem with the contactors burning up.  A 24VAC 40VA transfromer can run two contactors when its cold, but after an hour or so it will fail to turn on both contactors and one contactor will sit there and buzz untill it dies!  There are two solutions, either use two transformers or get a 75VA transformer!

CONCLUSION: A 24VAC 40VA TRANSFORMER CANNOT RUN TWO CONTACTORS!!

EcoQuest Fresh Air II air purifier repair 3

 Once again I am fixing one of my two Fresh AIr by ecoQuest air filters.  This time it struggles to turn on.  I was taking longer and longer to start up making multiple attempts but then failing and trying again.  It acted like a bad capacitor and the 8 volt power was at 5 volts so I tried a 220uF 16 volt capacitor from the 8 volts to ground.  It made no difference.  Then I moved the positive lead to the 12 volt power supply and it WORKED!

These pictures show where I soldered in the capacitor.  It need a little glue under it as well.

Simpler Arms for InMoov Robot

I have built several humanoid servo based robots over the years as can be seen in this blog.  The InMoov Robot arms are very complicated to build so I have simplified them with standard servo parts enlarged 50% to work with the larger HS-805 servos. These parts can be found on thingiverse.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7291737

The changes consist of servo mounting brackets and U arms that the servo rotates.

Her is one possibility for a arm made from these parts.

Rebuilding my InMoov Robot Head

I am Rebuilding my InMoov Robot Head.  It was printed years ago on a plastic 3D printer.  I am now on my third metal framed 3D printer and the parts are coming out perfect.  So I replaced a lot of bad parts and rebuilt it. This picture shows some of the defective parts that needed replacement.

Here are some pictures of the rebuilt head. I am using a standard servo for the head rotation with a 3D printed adapter.  I developed an adapter plate that is found on thingiverse. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7288822

I am building my biggest LED wall yet.

I am building my biggest LED wall yet. It should be 8 feet by 4 feet when done.  It consists of two panels each 4 feet by 4 feet in size.  Each panel is amde of 32 P5 64x32 Led matrixes. This first picture is me putting together one of the panels

Currently I only have enough of the matrixes to build two 4 by 6 panels.  Here the data and power cables are added.

This picture shows the controller is added to the panel. Power supplies are external so that the panels fit flat to the wall.
 

This is a demo picture testing the first LED panel.

I have built the second panel but it has two bad LED's to resolder, should have it running soon. Here is a picture from before they were mounted on the wall.

I bought a new 3D printer again this year a Creality Ender 3 V3 SE

I bought a new 3D printer again this year. It is a "refurbished" Creality Ender 3 V3 SE.  Last year I bought  Ender V2 and upgraded it with a quiet motherboard.  I had purchased a CR Touch Auto Leveling kit for it but did not install it. Now I know how important the auto leveler is!  I had also gone through three build plates on the old printer and then bought a TRONYX glass build plate. The TRONYX glass build plate is about 1/2 inch too small but worked GREAT!

This is a close up of the new printer, it looks more refined or finished than the old one.

This picture compares the old printer to the new printer.

CYD Cheap Yellow Display with Bruce firmware adding NRF24 CC1101 PN523 and IR

Back in 2020 someone told me the covid19 tests were radioactive.  I pulled out my Geiger counter and proved that was not true.  Now I am hearing the Covid19 vax gives people a Bluetooth/RFID/MAC address.  So I decided to venture into hacking to find out if that is true.

Right away I had a second use for these devices.  I am setting up a Raspberry Pi RaspAP filtered router.  I need to compare signal strength between the RaspAP and  Netgear router.  The objective is to add an antenna to the RaspAP and see how the two compare in signal strength.

I bought a LilyGo and a CYD to compare the two.  The CYD lacks many sensors and the LilyGo has a screen so small that you need a magnifying glass to read it.

So I decided to buy and add the additional sensors to the CYD device. Now there is a guy who has added several modules to a CYD using around 12 switches to select between the modules. I am hoping to simplify the design with less modules, three position switches, and 3D print a case for it.

Here is my preliminary schematic design to connect the CYD with Bruce firmware to several modules.  Some IR devies require 5 Volts, so this may be to much of a simplified schematic.

The IR would not work, it just received nonstop garbage, so I changed the schematic to get rid of the interference that was apparently coming from the powered down NRF24 and or CC1101..

This revision of the CYD/Bruce schematic has the power for the GPS receiver coming form the 3.3 volt upper bus and a switch to power it off as it consumes a lot of power. Also the CS to the RF devices is now switched.

.The 3D printed larger case is at: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7258129

I decided to try to fit everything in the smaller case.  Connecting the wires to the SD connector is tricky.  I then brought them out to a 4 pin connector.

The almost finished wiring, point to point wiring is no fun, a circuit board would be better!  No GPS or NFC yet.  I had to cut away room for the antenna connectors for the NRF24 and CC1101.  I have designed a 3D printed case with these changes built in!

The NFC PN532 was supposed to fit above the IR modules, and be fastened on the back cover.  But the back cover will not allow that! So I went with the GPS receiver instead.

Here is my source for the 1.25mm JST connectors that are needed.

I ran into problems with one CYD.  IT would only support one CC1101 or NRF24 not both or two of the same.  I chased it down to the clock connection.  This CYD has a ground plane right next to the clock connection and it was capacitively coupling the signal to ground.  I added a piece of electrical tape to fix the problem.

While I am at it, here is how it is progressing:

Here is the other side of the board.

Raspberry Pi Wireless Internet router and Filter with RaspAP

I have built a Raspberry Pi Wireless Internet router and Filter with RaspAP.  I tried a Raspberry Pi model 3 but out of three tries it only worked once. 

But with the Raspberry Pi model 4 came right up and ran.  All you need to connect is power and a ethernet cable for it to work!

In terminal type: curl -sL https://install.raspap.com | bash

Then I answered the many questions as follows:

Create Dir - Y

Complete - Y

Cookies - Y

Control - Y

Congestion - Y

AD Block - Y

Open VPN - N

RestAPI - N

Wireguard - N

VPN Client - N

Reset - Y

Once it is up and running, set the DNS server to 1.0.0.3 and 1.1.1.3 to block the porn sites.

This does a great job of blocking porn, but it also blocks the Ad blocker!  I have not found a solution to this issue yet.  The ad blocker cannot update but it also delets the database when it cannot update!

Another issue is the built in antenna only has a 20 foot range.  I will be adding an external antenna and will see how that increases the range.

This is a signal strength comparison to a Netgear router at -34 and the Raspberry pi at -51 dB.

Doubling the size of a LED sign

 I have two 40" by 16" LED signs. Each one has five by two of the 32 by 32 P6 LED arrays. I thought they were identical signs and thought that I could combine them to make a sign twice as big.  The first issue is the height, I am limited to 2 feet of height.  So the options are 7 by 3 or 6 by 3 LED arrays.  For 7 wide I need one more LED panel so I tested it with a spare panel that apperared to match.  Well, two of the existing panels had a bad LED and the odd panels blue color was a real mismatch.  So 6 by 3 is the best arraingement.

The next problem was that one sign had 35x35 LED's and the other had 27x27 LED's.  However in a test setup they completely match in colors and intensity except in the lowest brightness settings. So that problem can be ignored.

The next problem is extending the exrtrusions to make them wider, instead of 40" wide I needed 48" wide.  I designed and printed a 3D part that fits inside of the extrusions to allow two extrusions to be joined together.

The next problem is that one sign used magnetic devices to hold the panels to the braces but the other sign used double sided foam for that purpose.  I decided to use some of the magnetic holders and to design and print my own spacers for the rest of the sign. This holder can be used to space the panels back to match the extrusion but if you are using a 3" by 1" aluminum frame it can be reversed to space the panels back from the front edge.

This picture shows the center strip where magnets fasten the panels to the Metal.  However the magnets do not work and plastic wire ties were needed to hold the panels in place.

This picture shows the power supply mounting arrangement. There are three power supplies of 40 amps each.

This picture shows the spacers that fasten the panels to the extrusions.  Also you can see where two extrusions were fastened together in this picture.