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Author's posts
Sep 03 2014
Servo Motors
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 …
Sep 03 2014
AVR Raspberry Pi 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 …
Sep 02 2014
The BusPirate (a very useful circuit)
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 …
Aug 09 2014
PIR Sensor for your Arduino
A PIR or Passive Infrared module is really fun to play with. This is what they look like: They are basically a motion detector and are called ‘passive’ in the sense that these devices do not generate any energy for detection purposes. They work entirely by detecting the energy given off by other …
Aug 09 2014
Wireless Bluetooth Module for your Arduino
If you’d like to wirelessly attach your Arduino to another device (such as a phone or tablet) via bluetooth, I’d recommend the serial bluetooth module from Elecrow.com. Here is what they look like: The module has firmware from BOLUTEK. The PDF document with all of the available BOLUTEK commands is BLK-MD-BC04-B_AT COMMANDS . I …
Aug 07 2014
Connecting an Arduino to a LAN with the ENC28J60
I picked up a couple of these modules: from Elecrow.com so I could attach (communicate with and control) several of my Arduinos through a LAN connection. The main chip is the ENC28J60 from microchip.com. These modules are better than an Ethernet Shield in that you can easily attach these to any Arduino and they …
Aug 07 2014
Careful! Don’t Let the Smoke out!
[warning]Careful! Don’t let the smoke out![/warning] Hopefully you’ve never ruined any electronics device due to applying too much power. Some people have (cough, cough .. the voice of experience) and when this happens the device or component goes up in smoke. In popular jargon it is said to have “lost its smoke“. When working with …
Aug 06 2014
OBD-II Testing with an Arduino
OBD-II (an abbreviation for On-Board Diagnostics, Second Generation) is a set of standards for implementing a computer based system to control emissions from vehicles ( and a lot more ! ). If you are not familiar with OBD-II you can read more about it here. I just recently acquired an OBD-II UART board and cable from …
Aug 04 2014
Atmel versus PIC Microcontrollers
Many years ago (I am old ;-)) I was asked which microcontrollers are best, ones from PIC (microchip.com) or ones from Atmel (atmel.com). At the time I was asked, there was a lot of discussion about chip architecture, instruction sets and which chip was best. I thought at the time and still feel this way, …
Aug 04 2014
Fritzing Circuit Design Software
If you need a way to design a circuit or show a nice graphic of it for someone else to follow, you might consider Fritzing from fritzing.org. A quote from their website: Fritzing is an open-source hardware initiative that makes electronics accessible as a creative material for anyone. Fritzing.org offers a software tool, a community …
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