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I’m doing a project, a very simple one: it’s a sous vide cooker. The details don’t matter, as in this article we are going to focus on a single component: the KY-040 rotary encoder. If you are here, you have most likely just bought a KY-040 clone from China, and are looking into how to hook it up to your Arduino. This is a bit of a deviation from the usual highly technical and specific content of this blog, but there’s a good reason for it: I spent 15 minutes googling about this, and all I got was some generic copy-pasted (often clearly stolen) code that mostly - albeit very inefficiently - worked...

A few months ago, my father bought himself a water purifier. It’s a quite convenient and eco-friendly device which filters tap water, and optionally cools it and carbonates it, eliminating the need of buying bottled water entirely. The company that sold it to him also sold him a stand-alone faucet, as a replacement for his old one. This new piece of hardware is actually two devices in one: it has pipes for cold and hot water, like a standard mixer faucet, and also an additional pipe with no valve, directly connected to the water purifier...

ZigBee is a stack of protocols intended to enable IoT devices to efforlessly form mesh networks and communicate with one another wirelessly. I’ve been fascinated with the ZigBee platform for a long time now, but I had always been put off by how corporate-y the technology looked like (and boy, I was right). A couple years ago I decided to buy a few cheap CC2530 boards off AliExpress. The CC2530 is a SoC by Texas Instruments containing an 8051 clone as the main processor, with RAM (128K or 256K) and Flash, and the PHY for IEEE 802...