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The supplied 120:6 transformer should deliver ABOUT 6VAC - and ABOUT 6V should get to the LM317 which should make ABOUT 5VDC after the regulator dropout. The 4.7VDC you measured is ABOUT 5V. I have repeatedly capitalized the word ABOUT because it was never intended (and does not need) to be 5.0000V. It is just to teach about power supplies - which it would have done if it could only output 1V. But the extra circuitry affords logic probe and continuity functionality (for ABOUT 5V and ABOUT 3V3) - that is perfectly served by a max supply of 4.7V (or even 4.4V) so that is what it is. More on the "ABOUT" front: Measure the the voltage on any USB-connected MCU module that we use every month. You will probably find values ranging between 4.4-5.7 VDC - we never care or complain …

The supplied 120:6 transformer should deliver ABOUT 6VAC - and ABOUT 6V should get to the LM317 which should make ABOUT 5VDC after the regulator dropout. The 4.7VDC you measured is ABOUT 5V. I have repeatedly capitalized the word ABOUT because it was never intended (and does not need) to be 5.0000V. It is just to teach about power supplies - which it would have done if it could only output 1V. But the extra circuitry affords logic probe and continuity functionality (for ABOUT 5V and ABOUT 3V3) - that is perfectly served by a max supply of 4.7V (or even 4.4V) so that is what it is. More on the "ABOUT" front: Measure the the voltage on any USB-connected MCU module that we use every month. You will probably find values ranging between 4.4-5.7 VDC - we never care or complain about that because we never look at it and it (usually) doesn't matter. That typical, 4.4-5.7 VDC (nominal 5V) is what we intended to accomplish here - logic level voltages. You can make any type of power supply you want, but that is not what this one is. Confusing others with what you wish or think it should be is... well confusing and not helpful.Your contribution here is technically excellent A+, but pedagogically problematic. It would be so much more helpful without implication (to other participants) that something might be "wrong" because you randomly happen to want 12V. Why 12V anyway? Why not 18, 24, or 36V? The LM317 will handle up to 40V. We selected ABOUT 5V, because this system is also a logic tester - and logic levels are ABOUT 5V (or 3V3 which is also accomplished).Thank you for understanding and keep up the deep exploration!

A 220:12 transformer (what happens to be printed on the transformer) is the same thing as a 120:6 transformer (what we are using it as here). It is not "half the needed voltage", it is half of something else that doesn't apply to us. As the owner of the diner likes to say, "A slice of cheesecake only has half the calories of two slices, so dig in!" :)

The experimental educational toy (never intended as a piece of precision equipment) should make about 5V unless something is wired up wrong. Please keep in mind that the purpose of any HackerBox is to provide a valuable learning experience - in this case exploring the structure of a linear power supply and assembling one for yourself. Icing on that (already fantastic) cake is that the 5V output further supports the experimental features of powering, tracing, and testing logic circuits which generally operate at either 5V or 3V3 (nominal). Kind of the opposite of "extremely limited" for something that was really just supposed to be a learning experience. You're welcome! :)

There might be something else wrong there. The overhead just lowers he maximum output, it shouldn't make the control loop unstable. The LM317 regulator works for Vin in the range of 3-40V and an output range of 1.25-27V. The control loop works on the LM317 (not prior to it) so as long as there is at least 3V coming out of the rectifier and into the regulator, there shouldn't be any "undefined state". Is there any chance that one (or more) of your rectifier diodes are backwards?

The GSR doesn't spike, it drops a tiny bit under stress. For GSR watch the delta value. "The GSR sensor measures resistance of electricity traveling between the two finger cuff contacts. As your body reacts to nervousness or stress it releases more sweat, which changes the resistance of your body between the contacts, and the GSR reading will drop."

So the blink sketch compiled and uploaded ok, but not the Tor Badge...Maybe one or more of the three necessary Arduino libraries is missing?

Which sketch are you working on - Blink (Step 2) or the Tor Badge sketch (Step 7)?

For board definition "WEMOS D1 MINI ESP32", the value for LED_BUILTIN should already be 2 by default.

If you check the schematic in Step 10, you can see that the resistors R1-R11 and the LEDs D1-D11 could be swapped without any effect on the circuit. The real question will be the orientation of the LEDs. LEDs only light up in one direction, so it will depend upon which direction the LEDs were attached to the resistor pads and how that is oriented, with regard to the + and - power rails, within the PCB.

No, it shouldn't look like that. You may have missed one of the updates to the header file. Make sure all of the changes listed above are properly entered. I believe there are 11 lines that should be set up in four different sections of the file.

Follow the link in the first sentence of Step 6 that reads, "There are three different methods suggested on this forum for clearing the factory firmware on the Rtlduino." It addresses this issue exactly.

Please don't feed the trolls. Do you see any cameras, microphones, or GPS antennas on any of the microcontrollers?

Great news on using the link in Step 3.It sounds like you are mixing together the instruction from different steps (and different hardware)...Step 7 uses the TFT_eSPI Library for the TFT Display (having the backlight you mention). It does not use the ESP_8_Bit Library.The ESP_8_BIT Color Library is for the composite video output presented later in Step 11.

Which version of the Arduino Core for ESP32 are you running? The link in Step 3 will lead to v2.0.2 (as of Dec 2021). If you have an older one, give that a shot.

The instructions are perfectly complete. Perhaps we can help...When you say "the smaller OLED display not power up nor display anything" can you give a little more detail? The display doesn't do anything on its own, you have to connect it to the ESP8266, install a library, and then program the microcontroller to display output on the OLED. Did you do all of those things? Which steps worked? Which did not? At that point, what did happen? Give us something to work with here before incorrectly and rudely telling our instructor that their work is "sad" and "lacking".Regarding the AT command line interface for the RTLduino: Check the USB cable (data and not just charge), COM port, baud rate, Newline/CR. If you are still not seeing the AT command line inte…

The instructions are perfectly complete. Perhaps we can help...When you say "the smaller OLED display not power up nor display anything" can you give a little more detail? The display doesn't do anything on its own, you have to connect it to the ESP8266, install a library, and then program the microcontroller to display output on the OLED. Did you do all of those things? Which steps worked? Which did not? At that point, what did happen? Give us something to work with here before incorrectly and rudely telling our instructor that their work is "sad" and "lacking".Regarding the AT command line interface for the RTLduino: Check the USB cable (data and not just charge), COM port, baud rate, Newline/CR. If you are still not seeing the AT command line interface after carefully checking all those factors, it is possible, albeit rather unlikely, that the factory firmware is already cleared. (It would have been nice if they all came this way!) So try proceeding as though the steps to clear the factory firmware have already been completed. It is a little confusing that you haven't emailed our support just like you have many, many, many times before. It is odd that you opted to skip that process for this box and instead just made vague, obnoxious public complaints (sad? lacking? that is not cool, and not useful at all - words like that don't belong here).When you ask questions here, or contact support, always try to be very specific in providing useful detail so that we can give you meaningful help. Simply saying that two unrelated projects are junk and "nothing work" with no additional details or without asking specific questions to get assistance serves no useful purpose.

Clone Hero is sort of game controller oriented, but you can use properly configured keyboard keys as well. Try hitting space, up arrow, down arrow... It'll start to make sense.

that sounds correct

Check the polarity of the two reverse-mount LEDs. Also check the solder joints at the LEDs, and the solder joints where that chain of LEDs connects to the Pro Micro (IO Pin 15).

It was suggested to put Wire.begin(14, 13) in the sketch itself (just before the line with rtc.begin) instead of modifying the library.

Yes, you need to have code on the ESP32 set up to drive the Matrix over the HUB75 interface. You can try the HB0065_Clock.ino sketch from Step 8.

The D1 Mini has an auto-reset circuit based on the control signals from the PC serial interface. You should not need to use the reset button when programming the D1 Mini.

Nice work! We added a PCB spec showing the SD slot connections. It also shows all of the Arduino pin number definitions including two unused I/O pins that you can connect to on the PCB. The included TFT display does not have a touch screen overlay.

Nice work!

Doublecheck the wiring between the RDM module and the arduino - especially the TX line. The prompt comes from the arduino, so you'd get that even if the RDM wasn't there at all.You can test using the 7941W (see step 5) to program a 125KHz T5577 card and then circle back to the RDM6300 to see if you can read the same ID value from the card as you had written into it.

Check the soldering to the back of the LM358 module headers (to the pads of the HB100), make sure the LM358 module is not shorted against the metal shield of the HB100, check the jumpers between the LM358 and the MCU, and also try adjusting the potentiometer on the LM358 module to make sure the signal is getting amplified enough to be detected by the MCU.

Put "Serial." before the begin() and before each instance of println(). It's a little odd that they left those out of the example code.

Check the soldering the pins of the rotary encoder. Also check the encoder's pin assignments in the setup. If the volume keeps turning itself down, there will be no audio output.

You just need to be sure to also grab the subdirectories that go with the top-level ino file from the GitHub repository.

J2: Frequency Band Selector (2x5 pins)J3: Square, Triangle, Sine Selector (2x3 pins)[from Step 12, Phase F]

Be sure to select 115200 for Baud and Carriage Return for line endings in the Serial Monitor. Also, check the shorts at R2 and R4 to be sure they are set correctly for the markings on your CPU.

Here's a hint: Define a variable to store the state.Update the state variable based on detected button presses. Whenever changing the state variable, update the LED to match.

Very cool!

Nice Work!

The 1206 Resistor should be 15 ohm (not 150 ohm). It is specified for 3V3 of the standard, so it is a little dimmer with the technically "out of spec" 3V lithium coin cell.

Looks awesome. Nice work!

Yes, that is not right. The blockages might just be solder left in the holes from the hot air solder leveling (HASL) process. If that is the case, you can try heating the resistor lead with your iron while pressing the lead into the hole. If that doesn't easily open the hole up, contact our support team at support@hackerboxes.com and they will fix it for you.

Positive faces out from the PCB. That is common for that type of coin cell clip, but it is always best to double check. The easiest (and probably best) check is to use a continuity tester to see which coin cell terminal connects to the other GND points on the board. Most clips also show a "+" on the outer face, but some do not (see attached image). The close up image on Step 6 of the box guide does show the "+" marking on the clip.

Maybe you skipped Step 6 of the guide, specifically the part about setting up RTClib?

That pad of C20 and the power connector post next to it are both on the same net of the PCB (GND) so it will work fine the way it is.

Good job figuring out which line was open! Whenever I have issues like that, my first step is to go back and reflow all the solder joints. More often than I'd expect, that helps to get things moving.

In addition to setting the RTC to output a 12hr value, you could also try something like:if (n>12) n -= 12;

Did the previous steps work? If so, it's probably a library.

Could be an open (cold solder joint) or a short (pants without legs) on the Blaster assembly. Check the 2x8 header as well as the two 1x15 ESP32 headers.

We had a couple of cards where it helped to lower the access clock passed into the SD.begin function call. You can find "80000000" in the code and play around with knocking one or two zeros off of the end. For one of those cards, it seemed to work fine at the original speed after getting it to work at a lower speed. It is unclear why that happened, but we wanted to share it anyway.

Yes! A Schematic diagram for the HUB75 Blaster PCB was added at Step 4 of the guide.

That sounds very cool. Let us know when you get it working. Check out Step 6 (including the test_sd.ino sketch) for info about pin numbers to access the SD card.

There has never been an oscilloscope in HackerBoxes before. You definitely may have done a DSO138 on your own before. It was probably red. Correct? There are a bunch of different version out there.

That one is pin 1 (with pin 8 straight across from it). You are correct that isn't totally obvious. Some clues though:The 330 ohm resistor (orange orange brown stripes) is adjacent to, and connected to, those two pins (1 and 8). The 330 ohm resistor is shown in the schematic to connect between pin 1 and pin 8. Also the "unknown inductor" and 1uF cap are connected to the 1,2,3,4 side of the chip. While the other side of the chip only has connection to pin 8 (going over to the VCC header pin).

The pin numbers are shown in the image for Step 6. You can also google the LM393 chip to find a datasheet but the info you need is in that image. The pins for whichever MCU you are using just have to match the ones specified in the code.

Each HackerBox should have aspects that speak to a range of different ability levels, but the range is not infinite. Our goal is to meet a good number of members where they are and stretch them a bit beyond that - with different stretches each month. We don't want to entirely overwhelm someone who is a (hard working) beginner and we don't want to totally bore a seasoned wizard with spoon-fed everything. Yes, aspects of a box that will entertain someone with a lot of experience might be mostly unattainable for a beginner, but that beginner might enjoy digging deep on some other aspect of that same box, which might bore the more experienced user. Or the beginner might stick it out, ask for help, and see what they can pull off. Every aspect of every box will never speak the same meanin…

Each HackerBox should have aspects that speak to a range of different ability levels, but the range is not infinite. Our goal is to meet a good number of members where they are and stretch them a bit beyond that - with different stretches each month. We don't want to entirely overwhelm someone who is a (hard working) beginner and we don't want to totally bore a seasoned wizard with spoon-fed everything. Yes, aspects of a box that will entertain someone with a lot of experience might be mostly unattainable for a beginner, but that beginner might enjoy digging deep on some other aspect of that same box, which might bore the more experienced user. Or the beginner might stick it out, ask for help, and see what they can pull off. Every aspect of every box will never speak the same meaning for every member. That would be impossible. White belts and black belts can train in the same room, but they are working on different skills. That said, if even the more basic aspects are frustrating you and you do not wish to ask for help or struggle, there are a lot of other fun offerings out there that might fit your level and needs. For example, plenty of DIY electronics products are self-contained and provide more explicit hand-holding. Shop around. Check out all the different options from Adafruit. Every product is not for every consumer for all times, so figure out what works for you where you are right now, get to work, and have fun! You're always welcome to return to HackerBoxes when you're ready. We aren't going anywhere. However, if the most encouraging words you have for a (self described) n00b looking for new ideas are to simply discourage them, then you should definitely go somewhere. :)