September 2014 archive

DIY Dual Relay Circuit

BIY Relay Circuit

It is sometimes very handy to be able to control mains electric via an arduino to turn things like lights on and off.  [warning]BE VERY CAREFUL hooking up any mains electricity. [/warning] I built a dual circuit so that two things can be controlled from one board. Here is the fritzing graphic:   Once built, …

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3 PIN HD44780 LCD

LCD Shift Register Circuit

One of the problems of connecting an HD44780 LCD to an arduino is the number of pins taken up (usually 6). There is an older article here for hooking up an HD44780 LCD to an arduino with only 3 pins.  (Note: There is an alternate link here as the original link may be down.) The …

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DIY Arduino Circuit Board

DIY_Arduino_Circuit_Front

Shown below is one of my DIY Arduino circuits.                 The circuit does not have the FTDI chip built in. The FTDI circuit is only needed for programming and cutting out un-necessary components saves a bit of money. The ICSP connection (6 pins comming out the side) on …

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Servo Motors

Parallax Servo Motor

A lot of people when first getting into Arduino projects seem to like robotics. It is fun to create something that you can watch move around. If you are interested in such things, you will be interested to learn about servo motors.   Pictured below is a Parallax Continuous Rotation Servo motor.   Click the …

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AVR Raspberry Pi Programmer

Raspberry Pi AVR Programmer

There are a number of ways to program AVR microcontroller chips. For my DIY projects, I like to save money by buying components and putting them together to create what I need. I bought some blank ATMEGA 328P micro controllers so that I could make Arduino circuit boards for my projects. Building the Arduino circuit …

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The BusPirate (a very useful circuit)

BusPirate

A few days ago my son bought me a birthday present. It was a BusPirate from SparkFun. This is what it looks like plugged into a breadboard. The BusPirate is quite a handy circuit. I have used it to flash a BIOS chip using FLASHROM  and also program an AVR ATMEGA 328P with AVRDude. It …

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