How To Easily Program The ATtiny85

Posted on 2025-04-21 [Monday] by Jay Jay

This is a note for Future John. I found this no-nonsense video about how to program the ATtiny85 using an Arduino: How To Easily Program The Attiny85

Mail Call #26: Headset from Rown Fusny and Electronics from AliExpress | In The Lab With Jay Jay

Posted on 2025-02-15 [Saturday] by Jay Jay

This post is part of my video blog and you can find more information about this video over here.

You can support this channel on Patreon: patreon.com/JohnElliotV

Update: if you’re interested in the Rown Fusny headset I do a demo video over here: Demo #8: Unboxing and Product Review of Rown Fusny R03U Wireless Mono Headset | In The Lab.

In this video we take a look at what has arrived in the mail recently from AliExpress:

I also mention my headset which arrived from Rown Fusny which we will be looking at together in a future video.

The equipment I got from Jaycar included:

Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe! :)

Following is a product I use picked at random from my collection which may appear in my videos. Clicking through on this to find and click on the green affiliate links before purchasing from eBay or AliExpress is a great way to support the channel at no cost to you. Thanks!

Yum Cha HD Webcam with Mic USB Camera

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Arduino Keyboard library not working on Debian KDE

Posted on 2025-02-10 [Monday] by Jay Jay

Man, I just spent quite a bit of time diagnosing this particular issue.

The problem was that my Symbol Keyboard stopped working. This is a USB keyboard I made from an Arduino Leonardo. The touch screen was working okay, but the keypresses weren’t being delivered over USB.

Long story short, the 7-port USB 3.0 hub attached to my workstation needed rebooting! I disconnected the power supply and disconnected the upstream USB cable to remove both sources of power, then when I reconnected everything my stuff started working again, including my symbol keyboard.

Lesson learned: if you’re debugging a USB device failure try plugging the device directly into the host to avoid any potential issues caused by your hub(s).

It was lucky I had a spare 104-key USB keyboard in the cupboard because I needed one while diagnosing this issue (the Windows box I was using only has a tenkeyless 87-key keyboard plugged into it but the Windows alt-key codes require use of the number pad).

The latest incarnation of my symbol keyboard looks like this:

Lava Lamp Display | Mini Project JMP002 | Learning Electronics In The Lab With Jay Jay

Posted on 2024-10-27 [Sunday] by Jay Jay

This post is part of my video blog and you can find more information about this video over here.

You can support this channel on Patreon: patreon.com/JohnElliotV

In this video I do the Mini Project JMP002 developed and published by Silicon Chip magazine and sponsored by Jaycar Electronics.

The code for this project is here: XC3730_LAVA_LAMP_COLOURS.ino.

The parts for this project are these:

The links for this video are these:

Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe! :)

Yum Cha Macro Programmable 8-Key Mechanical Keyboard

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Most Important Skills for Electrical Engineering

Posted on 2024-10-06 [Sunday] by Jay Jay

Today I watched Most Important Skills for Electrical Engineering.

Stuff I need to learn includes:

He listed some important soft skills which included:

Critical thinking
Problem solving
Communication
Opportunity detection
Tenacity/high-pain-tolerance

Quake ported to Arduino Nano Matter and Sparkfun Thing Plus Matter Boards

Posted on 2024-10-06 [Sunday] by Jay Jay

Today I found Quake ported to Arduino Nano Matter and Sparkfun Thing Plus Matter Boards via this article from Hackaday: Quake In 276 KB Of RAM.

The code is on GitHub and there’s a YouTube video with a high-level explanation.

Electronics Project #8: Debugging the Symbol Keyboard Mini Project JMP001 | In The Lab With Jay Jay

Posted on 2024-09-01 [Sunday] by Jay Jay

This post is part of my video blog and you can find more information about this video over here.

You can support this channel on Patreon: patreon.com/JohnElliotV

Silly Job Title: Component Wrangler

In this video I add improved debouncing logic to the inaugural Silicon Chip and Jaycar Mini Project: JMP001.

Shout out and thank you to Tim Blythman for developing this project.

You can see Tim’s original code and my updates which improve the debouncing implementation.

In the video I mention that we use the pgmspace.h header from Arduino.

Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe! :)

Maxitronix 500 In 1 (500in1) Electronics Project Lab Kit

notes

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Symbol Keyboard | Mini Project JMP001 | Learning Electronics In The Lab With Jay Jay

Posted on 2024-08-01 [Thursday] by Jay Jay

This post is part of my video blog and you can find more information about this video over here.

You can support this channel on Patreon: patreon.com/JohnElliotV

This is the inaugural Mini Project! I introduced the Mini Projects recently. They are developed and published by Silicon Chip magazine, and sponsored by Jaycar Electronics (which is an Austrlaian electronics store, similar to Radio Shack in the USA, hopefully it doesn’t end up suffering the same fate.)

In this project, codenamed JMP001, we develop a USB keyboard which can send interesting and unusual symbols (which aren’t usually available on a keyboard) to a Windows computer using the alt-codes that it supports in a typical codepage.

For this first Mini Project I felt it was important to actually buy my components from Jaycar which I did for roughly eighty Australian dollary doos. Approximately US$50. The parts I ordered were these:

Belatedly I did also search for rubber feet.

There was quite a lot that went into the production of this video, and we accumulated a lot of links. Those are here:

In the end this first project was relatively successful, and we did get it to work fairly well on one of my Windows computers. As for the rest you can find out for youself in the video!

Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe! :)

Yum Cha HSC8 6-4A Ferrule Crimper Kit