Author Archives: Glen

Fort Collins Connexion FTTH Construction – Part Four

Welcome to part four of  my blog post on the construction and installation of the Fort Collins Connexion municipal broadband fiber network. In part three, we looked at the installation of service at my friend Collin’s house. In part four, … Continue reading

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Build a DMX FeatherWing to Control Lights with a Feather M0

This project uses an Adafruit Feather M0 board to control a group of RGB lights using the DMX-512 protocol. We’ll build a DMX-512 FeatherWing and connect it to the Feather M0 and a Particle Ethernet FeatherWing. Finally, we’ll develop a web-based GUI to select different RGB lighting effects and control the lights. Continue reading

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PoE-Powered RGB LED Floodlight

This project uses a Silvertel 802.3at Ag5300 PoE+ module with a built-in isolated 24 V DC/DC converter to power a 10 W ColorKinetics ColorBurst 4 RGB LED floodlight. The Ethernet cable and light plug into a small power / control board and PoE+ powers the floodlight and Art-Net UDP packets control the light. Continue reading

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Fort Collins Connexion FTTH Construction – Part Three

On January 7, 2020, Colin found a flyer announcing the availability of Connexion at his address in a neighborhood on the northeast side of town. He called the Connexion customer service number and scheduled an install. Here’s what happened when he had service installed. Continue reading

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PoE-Powered VFD Tube Clock

This is a vintage VFD tube clock that uses Ethernet for both power and data. The power is provided using 802.3at PoE+ and a Molex PD Jack that contains both integrated magnetics and a PoE Type 2 PD controller. The IP stack runs on a Microchip PIC18F67J60 microcontroller that has an integrated Ethernet MAC and PHY. The IP stack includes DHCP, DNS, NTP, and LLDP functionality. Continue reading

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It’s an Ethernet-Powered Christmas Tree!

The lighted tree in the video above gets both the power and data for its RGB LED pixels using a single Ethernet cable. Power for the pixels is supplied from an Ethernet switch using the 802.3at PoE+ standard. Data for … Continue reading

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An Enclosure for the Dalibor Farny R|Z568M Nixie Tube

In the first post in this series, we designed a socket and driver board for a Dalibor Farny R|Z568M Nixie tube. In the the second post in this series, we designed a power supply and controller board for the Nixie … Continue reading

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A Controller for a Dalibor Farny R|Z568M Nixie Tube

The first in this series of posts described building a socket and driver board for a Dalibor Farny R|Z568M Nixie tube and driving the tube using a power supply and Particle Photon from another Nixie project. This post covers building … Continue reading

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A Socket for a Dalibor Farny R|Z568M Nixie Tube

I recently ordered one of Dalibor Farny’s R|Z568M Nixie tubes. I wanted to get the tube powered up and displaying digits so I designed a small circuit board to act as a socket and switch the anode and digit cathodes … Continue reading

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Reverse Engineering the iColor Flex Protocol

Back in the early 2000’s–at least a decade before there were Neopixels or WS2812b LEDs–Color Kinetics introduced flexible color changing LED string lights. Each string contained fifty RGB color changing nodes. Each node contained an RGB LED and a custom … Continue reading

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