All About Technology

This is my Lamp prototype/Project made on a ESP based custom board called Octabrix ( This board is made by a startup called iB Hubs). With a simple app, i can control the colors of my lamp including any color that can be provided by a combination of Red, Green and Blue. There's also a provision of switching the lamp off. In addition to this, i have integrated voice control in this project. I can also control the lamp by asking Alexa(Amazon's Voice Assistant) to change it's color or switch it off. Basic Architecture: Here, i have a wifi based ESP8266 board called Octabrix that connects to the router at my home and then to the Blynk Cloud Server. The mobile App created on Blynk platform also connects to the Blynk Cloud Server. Thus, having common blynk server, i can send commands using the app to my hardware device(Octabrix). Voice Control integration through Alexa is obtained by using another cloud service called IFTTT. In-depth details regarding the project wil...

A general-purpose input/output (GPIO) is a digital signal pin on an integrated circuit or electronic circuit board(In our case, a microcontroller or arduino board) whose behavior—including whether it acts an input or output—is controllable by the user. GPIOs have no predefined purpose and are unused by default. If used, the purpose and behavior of a GPIO is defined by the user or the developer. These pins basically act as bridges to interface with the outside world. For instance, a LED can be connected to these pins as an output device or a sensor can be connected to GPIO for obtaining some input which can be processed by the microcontroller. However, these pins should be made available by the board manufacturer so that they can be used by developers and prototypers. Arduino also has many GPIO pins available for users to program and interface. The pin number and location can be found on multiple diagrams available on the internet. You can see the different pins as well as ...

Now, with everything setup, plug in your Arduino Board. If the drivers have been installed successfully, the PC should detect the board. Under the "Tools" option in the IDE, select the "Board" option and from the sub menu, select Arduino UNO as the board. Again, select "Port" option from the "Tools" menu and select the com port that is present there. In case of  multiple com ports, you will need to check in the Device manager to which port the arduino is attached to. Now, Simply Click on "New" under the "File" menu to open a new sketch. Alternatively, click on the "New" button below the toolbar. Don't worry about writing anything in your sketch. Let's first upload the blank sketch and check if the upload is successful or not. You can follow the video below to see a video guide for uploading the program. When you click on Upload, first an operation called compiling takes place. Compiling basically checks...

Now, that you have Arduino IDE downloaded and installed, fire it up by clicking the icon that must have appeared on your desktop. When you first open the IDE, a window will open up that shows something called as a sketch. Every program that we write in the IDE is called a sketch. On the toolbar, you can see a variety of options similar to every windows program. You can click File   to open a menu that gives variety of options like "New", "Open", "Open Recent" etc. There are several other options that can be explored as you get familiar with the tool. Go ahead, and click on the "New" option in the File menu. This will open a new sketch with some default codes present in your sketch. Also, you can notice some buttons below the toolbar. These are shortcut buttons for : Verifying the Sketch Uploading the Sketch Create a new Sketch (What we did just now) Open an existing Sketch Save the current sketch The above options are self explanatory...

Today, let me tell you about an efficient and low cost Microcontroller Board called Arduino. Some of the salient features of Arduino are : Microcontroller: ATmega328. Operating Voltage: 5V. Input Voltage (recommended): 7-12V. Input Voltage (limits): 6-20V. Digital I/O Pins: 14 (of which 6 provide PWM output) Analog Input Pins: 6 Now, A micro-controller is basically a small chip that has a processing element, memory elements as well as different peripherals on a single chip. We generally program the micro-controller by writing instructions either in assembly language or Embedded C, compiling that program and then burning the program on the micro-controller so that we can observe our results. Now, learning these languages in itself is a big task. Then, we additionally need a programmer to transfer the programming file onto the micro-controller. We also require some GPIO(General Purpose Input Output) pins so that we can interact with the Micro-controller. Arduino i...