This video is a teardown of the new Amazon Echo Dot revision 4 which I purchased on the recent black Friday sales.
High resolution photos and more information for the teardown are on my blog https://www.briandorey.com/post/echo-dot-4rd-gen-smart-speaker-teardown
The version 4 of the Echo Dot is a new round design and uses a double-sided main circuit board with a small board in the top of the case which has the microphones and switches to control the unit.
You can view previous teardowns and projects on my blog at https://www.briandorey.com/
We needed to make some more ropes for a model of HMS Victory which Andrew is building and he needed some small ropes for the rigging and port hole covers. He made this rope winding machine out of Lego and using two of the Lego mindstorm motors he was able to connect the motors together so one acts as a generator and turns the opposite end of the machine to twist the strands together.
This video shows the machine winding small copper strands to make a small copper rope.
In this video we are modifying the new Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W board to replace the on board Wi-Fi antenna with an U.FL connector to allow the use of an external antenna.
Please note this modification is done at your own risk and will invalidate any warranty and RF compliance.
This project is a Wi-Fi controlled RGB led controller using a ESP8266 Wi-Fi module connected to a RGB LED strip of 300 WS2811 LEDS.
Source code can be downloaded from https://github.com/briandorey/Wifi-RGB-LED-Controller
The esp8266-Firmware folder contains a Visual Studio Code project which can be compiled and uploaded to your ESP8266 module. The Wi-Fi network name and password will need to be changed to match your network and the static IP address needs to be configured to match your network.
The code uses the FastLED driver system and there are links in the source code to the pages which each effect was copied from.
Control of the light be either be via a web browser or using the Windows Application which has the source code in the RGBLightControllerUW folder. This can be compiled using Visual Studio to run on Windows 10 as a universal application.
More details about this project can be found on my blog at https://www.briandorey.com/post/esp8266-wifi-rgb-led-controller
This video shows the first full run of both soldering irons on our diy soldering robot project soldering a 40 pin header on a Raspberry Pi expansion board.
The speeds are set low at the moment on the stepper motors so we can make any position adjustments needed and once we are happy with the soldering placement we will work on making the machine faster by increasing the element temperature and the solder feed rates.