November 2020 Meeting Report

Micro Current

Martin wants to build his own microcurrent (uCurrent) board to measure small current draw - microamps - generally useful for low power controller projects that run on batteries. Knowing the current draw lets you calculate how long a battery will last or what battery capacity you need to meet a particular run time. Standard multimeters are generally not that good for measuring microamps.

The eevblog uCurrent and what need it fills is described here (includes link to article & schematic)

https://www.eevblog.com/projects/ucurrent/

Tool tips from Alex :

Raspberry Pi camera streaming

Raspberry Pi shutdown / startup switch. This ensures safe shutdown of the Pi, the operating system may be corrupted if the power gets switched off without a system shutdown first.

And a quick diversion to asbestos hands and fingers as shown in too many soldering iron promotional photos :

Steve showed a 2.8" TFT LCD screen working with an ESP8266 board and simulating an analog moving needle meter.

Anthony led a discussion about contemporary programming languages - Java, python etc. What new language should we be learning these days?

To be continued....