Oct 10 2014
Animals such as bats and porpoises use ultrasound for locating prey and obstacles. If you have an electronic device that needs to sense distances from objects (like a robot or an automatic door opener) you might consider using an HC-SR04 Sensor Module. No one can sneak up on you with a couple of these and …
Oct 10 2014
Any camera buffs out there? Sometimes it is handy to be able to measure the amount of light at a particular spot. This is needed sometimes so you can adjust your camera to take the ‘perfect’ picture. Or perhaps you are calculating the amount of solar energy your solar panels will be producing given the …
Sep 26 2014
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, …
Sep 03 2014
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
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
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 07 2014
[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 04 2014
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
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 …
Aug 03 2014
We live in an exciting age! Just think about how computer technology has progressed in just one ‘people’ generation! Electronic devices with smaller and smaller components are infiltrating our lives more and more making things easier. The ‘Internet of Things‘ is taking over! My main interest (and I hope yours too) is in electronics and …
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