Introducing nerdhut.de shorts

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As much as I love writing long and detailed articles about complex projects, those take a long time to finish. Unfortunately, I often end up procrastinating a bit more than necessary before I get some articles done. In those longer articles, I often discuss several topics that are relevant but not directly related to the projects themselves. For example, I sometimes discuss a power supply design or a software design pattern in one part of a longer series. However, to prevent me from procrastinating too much and to make it easier for you, new readers, and search engines, I decided to publish at least one short article each week. These shorter articles discuss a single topic in as much detail as needed using as few words as possible. I’ll keep working on longer and more elaborate projects in the meantime!

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Building an Arduino based capacitive touch kitchen timer – Part 5

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In this part of the Arduino capacitive touch timer series, I discuss the final working version of the project and what changes I had to make to the previous revisions. Towards the end of the article, I’ll have a look at what lessons I’ve learned while working on this project.

Continue reading Building an Arduino based capacitive touch kitchen timer – Part 5

Getting started with the Seeedstudio XIAO

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This video takes a look at the Seeedstudio XIAO board. In it, I unbox the device, take a look around it, assemble it, and I also show you how to prepare the Arduino IDE to get the XIAO up and running in no time!

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Building an Arduino based capacitive touch kitchen timer – Part 4

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The fourth part of the Arduino capacitive touch timer series discusses the case design of the project. It also outlines how to assemble the individual pieces of the enclosure and how I plan to improve the design in the near future.

Continue reading Building an Arduino based capacitive touch kitchen timer – Part 4

Building an Arduino based capacitive touch kitchen timer – Part 3

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This part of the Arduino based capacitive touch kitchen timer series discusses the software that will make the capacitive kitchen timer come alive. It also talks about how I implemented the capacitive touch ring and some experiments I conducted to ensure good gesture detection and user experience.

Continue reading Building an Arduino based capacitive touch kitchen timer – Part 3

Building an Arduino based capacitive touch kitchen timer – Part 2

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This part of the Arduino based capacitive touch kitchen timer series discusses the hardware aspects of the project. In the last part, we took a look at the project idea itself, the goals, and skimmed over the theoretical principles behind capacitive sensing. So, it was now time to design a simple circuit and a PCB, which proved to be quite a bit more difficult than expected…

Continue reading Building an Arduino based capacitive touch kitchen timer – Part 2

Building an Arduino based capacitive touch kitchen timer – Part 1

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A dear friend of mine recently sent me a very interesting idea for a new project, and I decided to pick it up and got working at it as soon as I could. His idea was to build a digital kitchen timer that operates like the USB volume knob I built a while ago. I didn’t just want to recycle an old design, and the USB volume knob would be pretty unsanitary in a kitchen anyway. So we came up with a new idea that involves capacitive touch sensing and an Arduino, and this series of articles discusses each part of the project from the first idea, to the theoretical aspects, all the way to the hardware and software. I decided to write this series as the project goes along (similarly to the older word clock series), so things are subject to changes. However, I think this gives you a good opportunity to see just how much trial and error goes into such a project, and I hope I can help you avoid mistakes that I make by documenting them.

Continue reading Building an Arduino based capacitive touch kitchen timer – Part 1