Capsicums grow well in the greenhouse but are quickly infested with aphids which are impossible to overcome without chemicals. Outside they don’t grow as well but nature keeps the aphids under control. We planted a few capsicum seeds in pots indoors, before mid winter, not the best time. They sprouted […]
To remote control a 50 watt LED flood light over a work area. Using a Sonoff Basic module connected in-line with the 230V mains power lead. Before wiring the Basic was flashed with Tasmota. When connected Tasmota is configured and connect to Home Assistant. Wiring is a bit tricky as […]
The Fire Denyer is a controller, the size of a standard light switch that is connected to smoke detectors and a control relay mounted in the electrical switchboard that cuts off power to the stove in the kitchen. The purpose is to shut off cooking when smoke is detected. Usually, […]
A 10 minute change that has taken 3 days I needed to change a time delay in a 8-pin PIC12F675 project started 4 years ago but has been updated since. No problem I thought, change the time, recompile, save a new output file and program some chips. But the chips […]
History Several years ago this site was created as www2.pmb.co.nz to use WordPress to replace our much older html only pmb.co.nz site. When rcbeacon.com was introduced 2-3 years ago, the site contained a lot of content. Fully converting from www2… to rcbeacon was going to be a big job. The […]
Caught in the USB lead I received a large DJI camera gimbal to repair, from a big Hex milti-rotor. The mini-USB connector was broken when the lead was accidentally caught and pulled. Removing the old connector The first step was to remove the circuit board from the gimbal without damaging […]
What’s the plan and why A few years back I was looking at building a larger (about 2M) flying wing for FPV. Since then I have been playing with multi-rotors. Not the 250 racing size but rather 350-400 FPV types. Considering the short flight times, relatively high accident cost in […]
68HC11 and 68HC05 During the later 1980s I started using the Motorola MC68HC11E9 single chip micro. Problem back then was that you couldn’t get Flash memory, so the single chip micros were one time programmable (OTP). That was a real pain because the OTP chips cost about $40 each and […]