Øyvind Nydal Dahl

Øyvind Nydal Dahl is an electronics engineer and author from Norway. He holds a master's degree in electronics and computer technology from the University of Oslo, with microelectronics as his main field, and has been teaching electronics since 2012 through books, workshops, courses and articles. He's the founder of Build Electronic Circuits and the online electronics academy Ohmify, the creator of Circuit Canvas, and the author of Electronics For Kids and A Beginner's Guide to Circuits.

Electronics For Kids – Build Cool Things With Electronics

Electronics for kids by Oyvind Nydal Dahl (Front cover)Electronics For Kids is the ultimate book for kids that want to learn how to build cool things with electronics.

I wrote it as the book I would have loved to have when growing up.

It’s suitable for all “kids” that are interested in electronics, even if you’re 8 or 100 years old.

The book is very hands-on, and you’ll get to build projects like a motor, a lemon-powered LED light, an electronic coin-tosser, a really cool LED reaction game, and much more.

It has been praised in several magazines such as The MagPi magazine (issue #50), the Wall Street Journal and Geekdad.

Electronics For Kids is available from:

How to build a cool touch-sensitive lamp

Build a circuitHere’s a fun project.

Build a cool touch-sensitive lamp you can have on your desk.

Once you’ve built this project you can also apply the touch control to other things like a fan or a door bell.

The first thing you need to figure out is how to sense touch from a finger.

Mathematics for Electronics – What Do You Need?

pcbI like math.

But, I’m not an expert.

I know the basics.

But when it comes to more complicated stuff, like heavy derivation and integration, I think I’ve forgotten most of what I learned at the University.

How to use analog sensors on Arduino

8x8x8_arduino_10These sensors are usually cheap.

And really easy to use!

An analog sensor is a sensor that gives you a voltage value that represents the measured value.

How To Whitelist Emails

To whitelist means to tell your email client that you want emails from this sender. To be sure that you receive project tutorials and other cool stuff, make sure you whitelist my email address. Click on the email client you use and follow the whitelisting instructions: Gmail Yahoo Hotmail AOL Outlook MacMail Verizon Comcast Cox.net

How to transfer a C program to a chip?

chipPer wrote me:

“What’s the easiest (cheapest) way to transfer a C program to a chip?”

Here’s my reply:

It depends on what chip it is.

Most microcontrollers require a programmer. This is a little thing you plug into the USB port that makes it possible to program the chip.

Installing Whatsapp on Intel Galileo

Whatsapp on an Intel GalileoIn this tutorial I will show you how to install Whatsapp on your Intel Galileo. I’ll also show you how to read sensor data easily from your mobile phone through Whatsapp.

You can easily extend this into whatever you want, so that you can control your DIY electronics with your smart phone.

I used a Grove Soil sensor together with an Intel Galileo for this project. But you can use whatever sensor you want, as long as it connects to the ADC of your Intel Galileo.

DIY Weather Station with Intel Galileo

dht11-sensorYour own DIY weather station is very useful if you for example want to optimize the growing process of your plants.

It gives you the possibility of getting real-time data or statistics about things the soil moistness, or the temperature around your plants.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to build your own DIY weather station using the Intel Galileo and a few sensors.

Intel Galileo Board for Measuring Rain and Moist

intel galileo boardIn this Intel Galileo board sensors tutorial you’ll learn how to use analog sensors. I’ll show you how to use a simple rain sensor and a soil moisture sensor.

This project could be used on a farm: To make better decision about when to water the crops, it’s very helpful to have information about how much it has rained, and the moisture level in the soil.

Even though I used an Intel Galileo here, you could just as well use the same code and connections with an Arduino.

The components I used:

How To Boot Intel Galileo From an SD-card

SD card on an Intel GalileoTo get access to more interesting functionality, you need to boot Intel Galileo from an SD-card.

The on-board Linux version running on the Galileo is very limited. So to get access to things like WiFi communication (through Mini-PCIe), you need to install a proper Linux version on an SD-card.

This will also give you access to lots of other libraries, so that you can create programs for example in Python or Node.js.

Another advantage is that if you boot from an SD-card, the sketch you upload to the board does not get erased when you power off the board (as it does if you are using the on-board Linux).

I wanted to try this, because I wanted to build a more advanced weather station than my simple weather station. When booting from an SD-card, I can easily create a web server that runs in the background. Then give easy access to sensor values from an external computer.

A Really Simple Arduino Oscilloscope Tutorial

Arduino Oscilloscope

This Arduino oscilloscope is perfect if you need an oscilloscope right now, but all you have is an Arduino.

Update: There’s an even easier way to do this now. Check out my new article on how to build an Arduino oscilloscope with 7 lines of code.

I needed an oscilloscope to debug my Radar Arduino library.

The code worked perfectly when it was not in “Arduino library”-form. But when I modified it into a library, it just didn’t work at all.

Since the radar module (from https://www.xethru.com) was using the UART, I didn’t have any way of checking what was going on.

So I needed an oscilloscope to check if there was actually any action on the UART lines.

Intel Galileo Projects: Simple DIY Weather Station

galileo-dht11I’ve played with the Intel Galileo a lot lately, so now it’s time to build some Intel Galileo projects!

In this project I built a very simple weather station that records the temperature and humidity and saves these to a memory card.

I’ll show you how to read temperature and humidity from a DHT11 sensor with the Intel Galileo. Then how to save these values to an SD-card.

Getting Started with Intel Galileo

Getting started with Intel Galileo Board

Getting started with Intel Galileo is almost like getting started with Arduino. But with a few twists.

I recently got my hands on an Intel Galileo. But it took me quite some time to get it up and running.

So I decided to write a small guide to show you exactly how I got started with my Intel Galileo.

How to find LED voltage and current

I got this question from Awaji about the light-emitting diode (LED):

Simple circuit to find LED voltage

[Awaji]: How can I know the LED voltage and the current ratings of an LED? Also, how is the resistor of an LED chosen? Thanks

[Oyvind]:

Here are three different ways to find the LED voltage and current:

  1. The easiest way is to look it up in the datasheet, or the store where you bought it. Look for LED forward voltage and the Test Current.
  2. You could find the LED voltage by using a multimeter with a diode function.
  3. You could connect a battery to the LED and a potentiometer. Start with high resistance on the potentiometer and gradually decrease it until you have a nice brightness. Then measure the voltage over the LED, and measure the current going through the circuit.