Save $$$ Black Friday @ NEXTION & SONOFF - until December 10! Welcome back to the Nextion Sunday Blog! Our ongoing development projects are temporarily suspended this week, because of great news: Black Friday is here, it comes with huge discount offers, and it lasts until December 10! Let's look at

Finally working: Nextion HMI, ESP32 and Sonoff's new Human Presence SENSOR SNZB-06P! First of all, I need to apologize for 2 Sundays without a new blog article! But getting finally everything up and running was not as easy as I thought... Although my dear Chinese colleagues had provided me with

Nextion, ESP32 Wifi, Sonoff & EweLink Attention! We interrupt the development of our Mega IO Project for a hot topic! I recently got an email from my ITEAD colleagues in Shenzhen, asking me if I'd like to blog about their newest baby, the NEW!!! Sonoff Zigbee Human Presence Sensor SNZB-06P

As at the beginning of every big project, things seem to advance slowly at the beginning. But if everything is well thought in advance and all the foundations well set, the speed of progress will increase afterwards as you'll see soon! After we defined a very compact an efficient protocol in Part 1 and started implementing it in a Nextion Demo project in Part 2, we need now the counterpart on the Arduino Mega side. That's our today's topic.

After we "invented" an extremely compact and efficient protocol in The Nextion MEGA IO project – Part 1, allowing to control up to 8 MCUs with their up to 12 PWM pins, 32 GPIO pins, and 16 ADC pins each (in case of the Arduino Mega) with only 3 bytes, it's now time to move from theory to practice! Our first goal was and is to make things better than in this project, where we used only 3 PWM channels and only a slightly reduced PWM resolution (7 instead of the theoretically possible 8 bits) for the sake of simplicity. Controlling a RGB LED this way limited the color resolution to 2 millions of colors instead of 16 millions as some attentive readers had noticed and reported back. Thus, we start a huge demo project today, with 12 sliders for the 12 PWM channels of the Arduino Mega, distributed over 2 screen pages, PWM1, and PWM2, having all the full 8bit range supported by the Arduino Mega.

As announced in my last Sunday's blog post, we'll start from this week with the Nextion MEGA IO project which will allow us from a simple Nextion HMI without onboard GPIO, to write all the 12 PWM pins, to read and write all the 32 digital IO pins, and to read all the 16 analog pins of an Arduino Mega! Later, we will even add the option to control the full IO not only of one single MEGA, but several of these. We will also get a downsized version for the Arduino Uno. With the knowledge and tools given successively in this blog post series, you should become a master when it comes to using any MCU for connecting various sensors, LEDs, motors, fans, pumps, relays, or whatever you might imagine!