MickMake Mail #24: FiPy, showers & my new PCB // News

This week’s MickMakeMail there’s my new PCB from EasyEDA, the FiPy and I reckon I could probably lay claim to be the first person to use an oscilloscope in the shower.

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EasyEDA PCBs

The PCBs from my first batch of EasyEDA manufactured boards are back! I don’t know how these guys do it, but they are offering 10 PCBs for $2 with your first order getting free shipping. The quality is pretty decent. They, of course, knew who they were shipping to, but my take on it is - if they can do a fantastic job once, they can do it again.

I haven’t yet built them, but will be doing that this week. Stay tuned for another video on the results.

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FiPy

The FiPy was a Kickstarter I backed a year ago. They certainly took their sweet time to deliver this one, but I got it in the end.Comes with a bucket load of GPIOs you can use along with the 5 networks supported. WiFi and Bluetooth are provided by the on-board ESP32. There’s also a full LoRaWAN stack and fully programmable with drag and drop Python scripts or using the Atom editor along with their PyMakr plugin.

Not sure if they have addressed all the power issues that exist with the LoPy.

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Self-powered shower temperature sensor

I just couldn’t pass this one up. A self-contained shower temperature sensor for only US$10! So I bought 4 of them to see if I could hack some WiFi accessibility into them. You can pick these up from BangGood, or GearBest. EDIT: The price seems to have increased to around US$15.

Fairly basic setup with a “sand off job” on the MCU, but there’s an LS164 - 8bit serial shift register and an ABS6 bridge rectifier. Simple PCB that can be hacked in an afternoon.I suspect I’m probably the first person to use an oscilloscope in the shower.But the inline gyro was producing a, (sort of), steady DC output of 2.44v at the lower water pressure to 4.57 at the highest pressure. Will probably have to use an LDO to bring that down to a reasonable level for an ESP8266.