https://www.devdotblog.com/ Recent content on DevDotBlog Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Thu, 10 Nov 2022 17:18:47 +0000 https://www.devdotblog.com/post/2022-11-10-heliostat-phase-4-saving-configurations/ Thu, 10 Nov 2022 17:18:47 +0000 https://www.devdotblog.com/post/2022-11-10-heliostat-phase-4-saving-configurations/ Phase 4: Now that we are capable of calculating the position of the sun, we want to get rid of the hardcoded values for the time and location. To save the time, we’ll use an extra piece of hardware, namely a Real Time Clock or RTC. The location we’ll store in the flash memory of the ESP32 board or in an EEProm. By doing so, we can power down the ESP32 board, bring it back up and still have correct values for time and location. https://www.devdotblog.com/post/2022-11-1-heliostat-phase-3-calculating-the-position-of-the-sun/ Sun, 30 Oct 2022 11:27:52 +0000 https://www.devdotblog.com/post/2022-11-1-heliostat-phase-3-calculating-the-position-of-the-sun/ Phase 3: Last time we wrote the code for controlling an ESP32 board running the .NET nanoFramework over a Bluetooth connection. In this post we’ll be concentrating on the algorithm that calculates the position of the sun. Note that as said in the post that started this series, we already selected an existing algorithm, but we need to port it to C# and see if the ESP32 board can run it. https://www.devdotblog.com/post/2022-10-28-heliostat-phase-2bis-esp32--bluetooth/ Fri, 28 Oct 2022 19:35:43 +0000 https://www.devdotblog.com/post/2022-10-28-heliostat-phase-2bis-esp32--bluetooth/ Why a Phase 2bis? Like explained in the previous post, we switched hardware from a WROOM to a WROVER ESP32 board. Sole reason is that the WROVER board has more Ram. This allows us to use some nanoFramework libraries like Dependency Injection and Json serialization which require more Ram to run. So, in this post we do the same things like in Phase 2, but we make use of the aforementioned Dependency Injection. https://www.devdotblog.com/post/2022-07-05-heliostat-phase-2-esp32--bluetooth/ Tue, 05 Jul 2022 19:35:43 +0000 https://www.devdotblog.com/post/2022-07-05-heliostat-phase-2-esp32--bluetooth/ Phase 2: In the last post we’ve setup Visual Studio for developing against the .NET nanoFramework. In this post we’ll be writing our first lines of code. Goal is to test if we can communicate over Bluetooth with our ESP32 board. Now, the code we’ll be writing is not your typical ‘hello world’ program, but more of a foundation for the later work we’ll be doing for making a Heliostat. What we want is that our ESP32 can respond to various commands we send over Bluetooth. https://www.devdotblog.com/post/2022-07-01-heliostat-phase1-preparations/ Fri, 01 Jul 2022 05:22:17 +0000 https://www.devdotblog.com/post/2022-07-01-heliostat-phase1-preparations/ Phase 1: Writing code for the .NET nanoFramework is done using the Visual Studio IDE ( Integrated Development Environment ). The language we’ll be writing in is C#. Both Visual Studio and C# come from Microsoft, and are around for a long time already, so you’ll find them very mature with lots of documentation available. There’s a very good ‘Getting started guide’ by the guys from the . https://www.devdotblog.com/post/2022-06-16-project-heliostat/ Thu, 16 Jun 2022 14:00:46 +0000 https://www.devdotblog.com/post/2022-06-16-project-heliostat/ An idea for a project: The living and dining places in our house are combined in 1 long room, with other rooms on either side. It has windows to the north and south, but doesn’t get much sunlight due to some trees near the south window. This is the reason it stays cool even in the midst of summer, which is nice, but it also means it’s darker and a bit colder in spring or autumn compared to other rooms that do get the sun inside. https://www.devdotblog.com/post/2022-06-01-first-post/ Wed, 01 Jun 2022 14:37:11 +0000 https://www.devdotblog.com/post/2022-06-01-first-post/ This blog is created using Hugo, a static website generation engine. Sources are on GitHub. Whenever a change to the sources is pushed, a GitHub action publishes the new content to an Azure Static Web App. All this is more explained here: Building and hosting this blog using Azure Static Web Apps The comments below are powered by giscus. For editing the posts i use Visual Studio Code and the Front Matter extension. https://www.devdotblog.com/about/ Sun, 20 Jul 1969 20:17:00 +0000 https://www.devdotblog.com/about/ Hi, i’m Serge Gommers, born in Belgium just before the first men walked on the moon. In high school i discovered electronics, and it clicked immediately. Also eternal thanks to my parents for buying me a TRS-80 Color Computer, which teached me how fun writing software can be. Some years later, I graduated as an Electronics Engineer and helped design telephone line modems and eventually GSM mobile phones. While doing so my focus shifted from almost pure hardware design to software.