Category Archives: cnlohr

How Low Can an ESP8266 Go?

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We’ve been tuned into coin cell designs lately given the coin cell challenge, so we were interested in [CNLohr]’s latest video about pushing the ESP8266 into the lowest-possible battery drain with coin cells. The result is a series of hacks, based on a reverse-engineered library and depends on a modified router, but that gets the power consumption down by more than a factor of ten!

Although the ESP8266 has a deep sleep mode that draws only 20 microamps or so, that isn’t as rosy as it seems. If you could go to sleep for a while, wake up for just …read more

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The Best Conference Badge Of 2017 Is A WiFi Lawn

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It’s February, conference season hasn’t even started yet, and already there’s a winner of the best electronic badge of the year. For this year’s MAGfest in beautiful downtown Baltimore, [CNLohr] and friends distributed 2,000 ESP8266-based swag badges.

These custom #badgelife badges aren’t. Apparently, MAGFest wouldn’t allow [CNLohr] to call these devices ‘badges’. Instead, these are ‘swadges’, a combination of swag and badges.  On board theses swadges is an ESP-12, a quartet of RGB LEDs, and buttons for up, down, left, right, A, B, Select, and Start. The swadge is powered by two AA batteries (sourced from Costco of all places), …read more

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[CNLohr] Reverses Vive, Valve Engineers Play Along

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[CNLohr] needs no introduction around these parts. He’s pulled off a few really epic hacks. Recently, he’s set his sights on writing a simple, easy to extend library to work with the HTC Vive VR controller equipment, and in particular the Watchman controller.

There’s been a lot of previous work on the device, so [Charles] wasn’t starting from scratch, and he live-streamed his work, allowing others to play along. In the process, two engineers who actually worked on the hardware in question, [Alan Yates] and [Ben Jackson], stopped by and gave some oblique hints and “warmer-cooler” guidance. A much-condensed version …read more

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The ESP: A New 1kB Contender Appears

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The ESP8266 is officially checking into the Hackaday 1kB Challenge. Doing something meaningful in 1kB of compiled code is tricky; modern SDKs like the ones often used for ESP8266 compile even the simplest programs to nearly that size. If you want to use this hardware in your 1kB Challenge entry, I have a solution for you!

The ESP8266 now has a barebones build environment focused on minimizing code size, as little as 131 bytes to boot up and blink an LED. It also “supports” some new, insane clock rates (like 346 MHz) and crazy development cycle speeds. The WiFi is  …read more

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The ESP: A New 1kB Contender Appears

Posted on by

The ESP8266 is officially checking into the Hackaday 1kB Challenge. Doing something meaningful in 1kB of compiled code is tricky; modern SDKs like the ones often used for ESP8266 compile even the simplest programs to nearly that size. If you want to use this hardware in your 1kB Challenge entry, I have a solution for you!

The ESP8266 now has a barebones build environment focused on minimizing code size, as little as 131 bytes to boot up and blink an LED. It also “supports” some new, insane clock rates (like 346 MHz) and crazy development cycle speeds. The WiFi is  …read more

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Fail More: The Story of [CNLohr]’s Clear Keytar

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[CNLohr] is kinda famous round these parts; due to some very impressive and successful hacks. However, for his 20k subscriber video, he had a bit to say about failure.

Of course glass circuit boards are cool. Linux Minecraft things are also cool. Hacks on the ESP8266 that are impressive enough people thought they were an April Fool’s joke are, admittedly, very cool. (Though, we have to confess, posting on April 1 may have added to the confusion.)  For a guy who puts out so many successes you’d think he’d talk about the next ones planned; hyping up his growing subscriber …read more

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[CNLohr], ESP8266, USB…

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“Round up the usual suspects…”

[CNLohr] just can’t get enough of the ESP8266 these days — now he’s working on getting a version of V-USB software low-speed USB device emulation working on the thing. (GitHub link here, video also embedded below.) That’s not likely to be an afternoon project, and we should warn you that it’s still a project in progress, but he’s made some in-progress material available, and if you’re interested either in USB or the way the mind of [CNLohr] works, it’s worth a watch.

In this video, he leans heavily on the logic analyzer. He’s not a …read more

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