About: Bilal

A motion sensitive firefly-filled pickle-jar that gets brighter when you move it, and then settles down to just twinkle a bit when its still. This project was inspired by a workshop led by Lila Finch and the great folks doing tinkering / creative learning at UC Boulder. Supplies: A microbit, v1 will do AA battery […]

This project builds upon the PIC/TI83+ interface developed by ThomasHenry (see Nuts & Volts August 2013 – A Mathematics Engine for Microcontrollers). Acknowledgment, appreciation, and kudos to him for writing the TI-library for Great Cow Basic that made this project possible. When I recently re-discovered that article, I imagined re-creating the only calculator that was […]

SmartSpin2K is an open hardware and software DIY module that converts BLE signals from a cycling APP (like Zwift, FulGaz, RGT, Sufferfest, etc.) and uses the information they broadcast to increase and decrease resistance on a spin bike by rotating the resistance knob with a stepper motor. SmartSpin2k receives BLE signals from common cycling peripherals such […]

In this project we demonstrate BBC micro:bit how to connect it to WiFi and send a notification to a phone without writing a single line of code. The micro:bit comes with a microphone, among the other features. We are going to use it to detect loud sound e.g. clicking fingers and when a loud sound is detected we send […]

Just two weeks ago, the pico, a new microcontroller, the pico, was released by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, well known for the incredibly successful series of Raspberry Pi single-board computers. The new microcontroller uses a brand new chip, designed in-house, the RP2040. It has two 32-bit cores running by default at 125MHz. It has been criticised […]

In this IoT project, I have shown how to make IoT-based Smart Home Automation using Multiple NodeMCU ESP8266 network to control all the home appliances from the pushbuttons & Blynk App. If the internet is not available, then you can control the home appliances from manual switches. During the article, I have shown all the steps to make this smart […]

The new Raspberry Pi Pico offers Dual Cores and Interrupts if you use MicroPython. I thought I would give it a go and try explain some of the pitfalls to avoid. This project keeps the action running on the two cores very simple, so that we can concentrate on new aspects of the code: setting […]

So, in this video we’ll be seeing how to build this haptic feedback device and the ambient light system which reacts to the player’s health value inside a PC game! For that we’ll be using the ESP-NOW protocol, about which we learnt in the previous video and also see how to use different RGB LEDs […]

This project is a follow up of the Illuminated Presents project that I posted earlier. My wife really liked the Illuminated Presents but kept them as Cubes and did not put a bow around it to turn them into presents. Because of this success I created a second one – called Illuminate Cubes since that is what […]

Introduction: I built this project as a birthday present for my oldest daughter. She had recently moved far from home and I wanted her to know her family was still there for her. I chose a Lord of the Rings theme and aesthetic because she and I had watched the movies together as she was […]