Our Most Popular Project Ever & Updates

We’ve been working hard at RNT and Maker Advisor, and publishing a new project or article once or twice a week. Additionally there’s a lot of new stuff going on, and we have some exciting news for you. Keep reading this post to stay up to date with all the news.

Our Most Popular Project Ever

Last week we’ve published a project that became our most popular project EVER – How to build an All-in-One ESP32 Weather Station Shield. In that project we show you how to build an all-in-one ESP32 weather station shield and display the sensor readings on a web server that updates without the need to refresh the web page.

We had a lot of good feedback from our readers, the project was re-tweeted several times, and it was even featured on the front page of hackaday.com. If you haven’t had the time to check the project, click here to read it.

Latest Random Nerd Tutorials Projects

In case you’ve missed it, here’s a list of all projects we’ve published in the last few weeks. We also had a lot of good feedback from these projects.

[13 February] ESP8266 Daily Task: Publish sensor readings once a day in Thing Speak
[07 February] How to Build an All-in-One ESP32 Weather Station Shield
[03 February] Control Xiaomi Bedside Lamp with Node-RED
[01 February] CCTV Raspberry Pi Based System with Storage using MotionEyeOS
[31 January] What’s the Best Raspberry Pi Camera For Your Project?
[31 January] Install MotionEyeOS on Raspberry Pi
[26 January] Guide to Fingerprint Sensor Module with Arduino
[23 January] ESP8266 Wi-Fi Button – Dash Button Clone
[20 January] Build an 8x8x8 LED Cube DIY Kit

Coming Soon.. ESP32 Course

The ESP32 is a hot topic, and many of you are asking for ESP32 tutorials and courses. We’ve been working on a brand new course with the ESP32 that should be released soon. Here’s some modules we have ready at the moment:

Module 1: Getting Started with ESP32
Module 2: ESP32 GPIOs
Module 3: Deep Sleep Mode
Module 4: Web Servers

We’ll be adding a Module about Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) very soon. If you have any ideas of subjects or projects you’d like to see covered on the ESP32 course, we’d love to hear from you.

What’s New on Maker Advisor?

We’re still figuring out the best way to improve your experience on Maker Advisor. For those of you who don’t know, we’ve launched Maker Advisor a few months ago, and it aims to be a place where makers can find advice on the best tools for their projects, as well as the best deals on those same tools. You can click here to subscribe to Maker Advisor and stay always up to date about the latest deals and best tools.

Recently, we’ve completely changed the layout of our front page. We’re displaying a grid with the best daily deals right on the top. When you go to Maker Advisor you can easily get your eye on the most updated and best deals.

We’ve been writing product reviews about the tools that makers and electronics hobbyists use more often. Now, finding our reviews on the best tools is much easier. We’ve compiled all our best product reviews on a neat table on the front page, so that you can easily pick the best tool you’re looking for. Here is a sneak peak of that table.

We’d love to hear some feedback about the actual look of Maker Advisor and how we can improve your experience.

We’ve also been publishing frequently on Maker Advisor. Check our latest posts:

[17 February] Best Adjustable Circuit Board Holder – PCB Clamp
[17 February] Best Helping Hands for Soldering (updated)
[09 February] Best Bench Power Supplies for Electronics Hobbyists
[09 February] Best Soldering Irons for Beginners and Hobbyists (updated)
[03 February] Smart Bedside Lamp with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
[20 January] How to Build an 8x8x8 LED Cube DIY Kit
[27 January] Best Arduino Books For Kids

Our Latest Book “20 Easy Raspberry Pi Projects” is Finally at the Printer

As you may already know, we (Rui and Sara) had spent the last one and a half year writing a book for No Starch Press about projects with the Raspberry Pi. We’re happy to announce that the book is being printed at the moment, and you’ll be able to get a hard copy of the book later next month (March).

As the name suggests, “20 Easy Raspberry Pi Projects” is a compilation of 20 beginner-friendly electronics projects, perfectly suited for kids, parents, educators, and hobbyists looking to level up their hardware skills.

We put a lot of effort and time writing this book and we couldn’t be happier with the result. The book looks great, the projects are interesting and fun, and it is beautifully designed with a lot of color (not grayscale). Additionally, the Random Nerd Tutorials community has a special paragraph in our acknowledgments page.

You can order your copy now, and get immediate access to the early access version. You can also get 30% off with the coupon code EARLYBIRD.

We Made a Partnership with JLCPCB

We’ve recently made a partnership with JLCPCB, a PCB manufacturing company. Our latest video ”Build an All-in-One ESP32 Weather Station Shield” was sponsored by JLCPCB.

They provide us with free PCBs and we promote their PCB prototyping service. This doesn’t change our opinion about JLCPCB. Their service is really good, and the PCBs have a very good quality. If you buy your PCBs from JLCPCB, you are indirectly supporting our work. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t order your PCBs from other place – the GERBER files we provide to build the PCBs should work for any PCB manufacturing company.

For some time we’ve been wanting to take our projects to another level by building “finished” circuits on a PCB, instead of always using a breadboard, but we hadn’t had the time to put the effort to make that step.

The partnership with JLCPCB was the right “excuse” to start designing PCBs, and come up with finished looking circuits. So, we are planning to cover PCB-related projects on our blog. However, if designing and building PCBs is not an option for you, don’t worry we’ll still provide all the instructions and schematics to build your circuits on a breadboard.

Wrapping Up

A lot of good things happened since the beginning of the year, and a lot of content has been published. So, we’ve decided to share this blog post to keep you up to date with what is going on in the Random Nerd Tutorials community.

Thank you so much for your support!

Rui and Sara