Yes they do suck (NJ). Maybe I should donate my temperature sensors to charity when I received them.
I heard a statistic on More or Less. I can't remember exactly what it was, something to do with if you work minimum wage in this country you're in the top 90% of pay in the world.
Before I properly design my PCB I'm going to try and make a unit that works with a 18650 rechargeable lithium ion battery instead of AAs. I should be able to rip some out of an old laptop battery if they still work.
I haven't got many 3.3V boost thingies (needed for the temp sensor) for my current setup and they're not that cheap. Should be cheaper to use a zener diode/something else to drop the 4.2V for the RF24 radio.
Surprisingly that worked. With a normal diode, not a zener. Used the forward voltage of the diode to drop the Li-Ion voltage down to the voltage the radio works at. No voltage regulators needed now, and the DS18B20 temp sensor will work at all the voltages. I'll just have to be careful not to short circuit anything and blow up any batteries.
Yes, looks like it. Just looking it up and they shouldn't be discharged to under 2.4V. All the cells in the laptop battery are 2.2-2.3V so maybe I shouldn't be using them. The one I charged didn't explode though.
My !!/really exciting/!! Atmega 328p programming board.
It's got the 16MHz crystal and caps so I can program my chips to run at 8MHz off the internal clock before sticking them in my temp sensors (only have 1 so far though).
They're pretty easy to get working. Everything on that board will get it detected by AVRdude. You do need a USBasp to program it or upload a bootloader if it doesn't come with one.
Really? Cheaper to buy a fully assembled board than a single chip? How much do you buy nanos for? My 10 Atmegas cost £20 so £2 each.
I did try disconnecting the voltage regulator and power LED from a mini but couldn't get the power consumption down far enough. Much easier with the DIP chips if you want to go low power.