Qball's Weblog

ESP32-P4 base immich photo frame

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 23:00:00 +0100

VALLHORN Wireless Motion Sensor teardown

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0200

I was at the Ikea this week and picked up the new motion sensor. The VALLHORN.

ATMAGE328pb and NRF24 - 2.0V.

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200

As a follow-up on yesterdays blog post, I’ve tried to modify one of my sensor PCB to run at a lower voltage. First I switched from the external 16MHz crystal to the internal 8MHz oscillator. This should allow us to go as low as 2.7V, by enabling the clock divide 8 fuse bit we can step this down to 1 MHz. At 0-4MHz we can go down to 1.8V. Ideally I run it at 4 MHz but I have no crystal that fits on the existing footprint nor are there for sale.

NRF24 10th month update.

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 20:00:00 +0200

Battery life time

Long range with NRF24L01+ and ina228 power monitor

Wed, 04 Oct 2023 20:00:00 +0200

NRF24L01+ LNA

Low power with atmega328pb and NRF24L01+

Sun, 17 Sep 2023 20:00:00 +0200

Recently at work I had to do some experiments with the classic nrf24l01 modules. These are simple transceiver modules allowing you to send/receive small messages. Even thought I found two in my collection, I never really played with these modules.

Making the stupid dumb V2. UPPÅTVIND

Sun, 15 Jan 2023 23:00:00 +0100

About 1 1/2 year ago I made a blogpost about making the Förnuftig smart. This one is still in operation. When I was at the IKEA I saw they now sell new model that is pretty small, the UPPÅTVIND.

Getting NTFY.sh going

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Doing a lot in home-automation one key part is notifications. In my opinion notification needs to satisfy the following:

Hitting a new low-power record with the esp32c3 - part 2

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0100

To get to the low power usage of the previous blog post there several steps I took. The main goal off most changes is to ‘race to deep sleep’. Many of these tricks are obvious, but it never hurts to list them again. All the below steps are done when using the esp-idf SDK.

Hitting a new low-power record with the esp32c3

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0100

When looking up some information I blogged about in the past, I realized I haven’t posted any updates in ages. A while back I switched to esp32s2 and got some nice result out of this single core chip. However espressif in there wisdom decided to stop producing the esp32s2-wroom and marking it NRND. This must be their shortest lived SoM. The did release the esp32c3, this is another single core chip, with a RiscV running at 160MHz. I think it is a step down from the esp32s2; less hardware modules (f.e. One that I used for 1 wire protocol), no ulp, bluetooth (that I don’t need), needs more external components and less pins on the wroom module.