Hi From Downunder

Hi All,

Bill from Melbourne, AU. My background is electronics/telecommunications engineering; did an apprenticeship in the '80s, worked as a tech/engineer through to about 2000; been in IT manager positions since then . . . off the tools. 

A couple of years ago I got back into Arduino as a way to 'relearn' a lot of the principles I'd forgotten over the years. I'd been working with large telecoms networks and wanted to get back to the nuts and bolts. 

After re-acquainting myself with the basics through Arduino UNO, I've slowly moved onto ESP8266 (mostly WEMOS D1R2 and Mini) and more recently ESP32 (I'm constantly amazed buy the versatility and power of these very inexpensive devices). I use Blynk quite a lot, it's a quick and easy way to make a mobile controller/display, but is also very configurable if you want to dive deep.  

My most recent project is (yet another . . . ) Weather Station . . . Temp, Humidity, Air Pressure, Wind Speed, Wind Direction, Rainfall and UV Index on an ESP32 with Blynk as the display. After learning the individual components it was time to put them all together - it's a great project to learn about hardware, programming and integration.

I'm currently working on making a portable WiFi Scanner/display with Arduino Mega as the display controller (it's a cheap TFT shield, but quite large, but won't work on ESP8266) and ESP8266 as the WiFi Scanner. Both work well independently, and the excellent tutorial on this website had me using I2C communications between the devices in no time . . . too easy . . . but . . . I2C string length is limited to much less that the data I want to share. There are a number of options, I'll discuss the details in a separate post.

I look forward to your help, and I also enjoying sharing my experiences, as I've learnt the last few years . . . If you want to do something, someone else has probably already done it . . . if you can find them it will save a lot of time and angst 😉

Thnx for accepting me and I look forward to sharing!

cul

billd