How to protect ESP32 OLED display from cracking

As great as some ESP32 development boards are, they are very far from perfect and many different models can have different problems. Like, for example, ESP32 with an OLED display. If you do not handle those boards very carefully, you will destroy them in no time. The OLED screen is not protected and edges are very prone to damage. Even a not-so-strong hit on the OLED edge can crack them.

ImmersionRC Ghost GPS Telemetry

ImmersionRC Ghost 2.4GHz long-range LoRa based radio system was announced a year ago and is available on the market for only a little shorter. In this time, ImmersionRC put quite an of effort into making it better, but for unknown reasons always ignored one very important aspect of a long-range radio control link: telemetry!

How to use stepper motors with Arduino

Stepper motors are the workhorse of modern automation and mechatronics. You want something to more and move precisely how much wanted it to move? You use a stepper motor. This is why, we use steppers in cars, robots, all kinds of automation, 3D printers, CNC machines. You name it.

The main difference between a stepper motor and any other electric motor is that the stepper, when electricity moves through its coils, will rotate the shaft only by a defined angle, one step. If you want it to move another “step”, you have to energize the coils in a different way. The step is constant for the motor. For example, a motor with 100 steps per resolution, will always move 3.6 degrees per one full step. Motor with 200 steps per revolution will move 1.8 degrees per step and so on.

Artificial intelligence for developers - GitHub Copilot

Artificial Intelligence, aka Skynet, is very often overhyped by companies and underhyped by developers (there is no AI, it’s just another IF in the code). It does not change the fact, that AI is used in more and more places. Just look at Tesla autonomous pilot. And for years you can hear that very soon this or that job will be replaced by artificial intelligence. Is that true? No, I don’t think so. Still, who knows how the future looks like?

What would happen if you feed trillions of lines of code hosted publicly on GitHub to AI? Would you create an Artificial Software Developer? No, but maybe a useful tool would be created? A tool that suggests you not only single lines of code but whole functions and code snippets? Even based on comments? Why not!

DIY camera slider with ESP32 and Arduino

If you go into the video production, even as simple as short videos for YouTube, you will discover that to shoot better B-rolls and add some dynamics to usually static shots (if you do not work with a real cameraman), one could use a camera slider!

You can buy one. That is always an option. But if you want a motorized slider with remote control, you might discover that they are not cheap. You will need at least a few hundredths dollars to buy something useful.

The other option is to build one yourself. This is the option I have chosen.

My motorized camera slider uses ESP32 with Arduino. ESP32 provides both WiFi Web interface for the slider and drives a single NEMA17 stepper motor with a TMC2209 step stick driver.

Bitcoin mining, AWS, Wordpress and security leaks

A few weeks ago, my AWS (Amazon Web Services) account was hacked, someone got access to AWS Console, created a bunch of EC2 instances, Lambdas, and started mining cryptocurrencies. I realized what is happening only a few hours later. The price was high and low at the same time. It was $500. So not too shabby. But if I would not react, it could go up in thousands of dollars quickly.

INAV 3.0 Final is finally here

Almost exactly six months after the previous major release and four weeks after releasing the first test version, the INAV team is proud to announce that INAV 3.0 is ready!

The full list of changes in INAV 3.0 is very long, and it was already covered here and here. Instead of repeating myself again, let me just write down the ten most important changes! Bear in mind, it’s a subjective list, and everybody might find something beneficial to them!

1. Turtle mode
2. DSHOT beeper
3. D-term processing for airplanesBrand new fixed-wing autotune
4. New defaults for fixed-wings that will give better performance out of the box
5. MAVLink v2 support
6. RC over MAVLink
7. Greatly improved and simplified compass setup. Right now “Default” means 270FLIP, which is the actual default for the majority of GPS units.
8. Prearm mode
9. Smoother waypoint missions with nav_mc_wp_slowdown = OFF
10. F3 target deprecation. Sorry, INAV no longer supports F3 boards. Finally!

Where to get INAV 3.0?

• Firmware https://github.com/iNavFlight/inav/releases
• INAV Configurator https://github.com/iNavFlight/inav-configurator/releases

NVIDIA Broadcast is awesome but not so much

Everybody wants NVIDIA RTX series graphic cards. OK, not literally everybody, but gamers and cryptocurrency miners want to have at least RTX 3060. Add high demand to low supply and prices will skyrocket like crazy. Now, NVIDIA wants to make one more group of people crave for RTX series graphic cads: streamers.

Yes, those streamers from Twitch, YouTube, and other video platforms. Plus, other people that are into audio and video processing. How NVIDIA wants to achieve that? By putting AI (?) on the RTX GPU to process audio and video and apply effects like noise removal, background removal, or background replacement. You know, having a green-screen and chroma key without a real green-screen behind your back.

INAV 3.0 is ready for early adopters

Like every six months or so, it’s my great pleasure to give you the next release of INAV flight controller software. The INAV 3.0 is the next major release that brings multiple new features to the table. And this time, both multirotor and fixed-wing pilots will find something interesting for sure.

The full list of changes is very long, so let me just list the ones that I find the most interesting.

GitHub Actions changes to fight cryptocurrency miners

GitHub actions are a great CI/CD setup for every open-source project. Of course, as long, as the project is hosted on GitHub. It turned out, however, that cryptocurrency miners started to take advantage of that and propose abusive pull requests that were mining cryptos using GitHub computing power.

This changed somehow. Yes, if you really, really want to, you can propose a PR that will mine for you, but now, if you are a first time contributor, Actions will not run until someone approves it.