I'm a fan of your fan

I recently played around with mqtt again and used one of my #Ignore this ESP8266 board -s to internet-of-thingify this fan construct. Searching for reasons why the uln2004 wouldn't work with 3.3V I tried pnps and npns until I found that I haven't declared the pins I was using as an output. I might have also connected the 12V with the 3.3V line while experimenting :D but in the end it turned out that I had also connected the fans backwards. Muah. But now it runs and I can control it via MQTT.fx - winning.

The ESP arduino soft PWM runs at 1kHz and I can hear it, that is kind of annoying.

Don't forget to set different clientIDs ;)

I'm soldering one of the last batches of RFid readers for work, before we skip to a "professionally produced" version. To be honest, I'm a bit relieved that we are replacing the arduino + MC522 modules with something created by guys that actually know stuff about RFid. But on the other hand I can be a bit proud that these readers are working for 2 seasons now and with pretty decent results, knowing that they worked close to water (sometimes even in the water...) and in the sunlight and rain. In a way we are a hardware start up as well, even if we actually don't want to. I will soon release the design files etc. and tell some stories around it - actually looking forward to that.

These parts are printing right now - I'll have to find a base worthy thing yet, where I would screw that center piece on to and the controller board as well.

3D printed parts are ready and I screwed in M3 16mm screws, that are a size too small and about 19mm too short - so I ordered some M4 35mm screws with nuts on eBay and probably payed too much. The fans seem to be not the most powerful fans, what makes sense since they cost about 3 Euros each. I might use some incense sticks and a black background to make a photo project out of it. The humming of 4 fans is noticeable, but hopefully some PWM will bring it down.

shorter text than title.