Start of a blog - KaRadio Project

Hello everyone !

I decided to start a blog to keep a track of my electronics stuff I want to build.

I found the KaRadio Project, that aims to build a webradio - you know, the thing, not the stream. A real object that connects to the Wi-Fi and plays your favourite radios.

Some useful links :

KaRadio's GitHub : https://github.com/karawin/Ka-Radio
The Hackaday Page : https://hackaday.io/project/11570-wifi-webradio-with-esp8266-and-vs1053
The KaRadio Group on Facebook (very active !) : https://www.facebook.com/groups/162949914181385/

As I tried a first prototype, I was really amazed what the main chip, the ESP8266, was capable of. So I decided to buy second-hand stuff in flea market to build a nice little webradio.

For the moment, I have my prototype working, but most of the work lies ahead : adding control through a second microcontroller (MCU for short), adding buttons, pushing everything into a case, adding energy support... heh, I'm hyped !

Nonetheless, I will have to wait a little because my second MCU (another ESP8266) is used for some exams I still have to pass. So I'm cautious not to tamper it while it works for my exams.

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Flashing an STM32 "Blue Pill"

Flashing this STM32 "Blue Pill" board took me 5 hours. I finally recieved my microcontrollers. I have at disposal : A brand new WeMos D1 Mini (it's a smallish NodeMCU) An Arduino Pro Mini (it acts just like a Leonardo, but it lacks some interesting pins sadly :( ) An STM32F103C8T6, I'll call this the Blue Pill for short. The Arduino Pro Mini has an Arduino bootloader out-of-the-box, so I could play with it directly. It's nice ! Still, it lacks the double Serial of the original Leonardo, and most importantly, there's no A4 and A5 pins, so libraries for I2C won't work without modification. But the Blue Pill needs more work. Basically, I followed the instructions on this site : http://wiki.stm32duino.com/index.php?title=Installation Since it's quite complicated, consider the following as a tutorial to set up your Blue Pill. I tried different things, the following has worked for me. Before doing anything software-related, while reading the B...

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Electronics on the kitchen table

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