Interacting with vehicles can be pretty tough. Cars are electrically noisy environments and, being powerful and heavy metal machines, a little tricky (read, dangerous) to play with. Worse, they’re all different! Even with the advent of the CAN system and standard, manufacturers can be infuriating in their insistance on doing everything in their own particular…
Bluetooth Low Energy tutorial series (part 1) published.
- by: Pat Deegan
- On
I’m pleased to announce that the first set of pages for the Bluetooth Smart/Low Energy Tutorial series have been published. Within, you’ll find a BLE crash course, a DIY BLE module breakout board (including an Eagle library so you can use it in your circuits) and a complete universal bluetooth low energy client program– with…
What’s the easiest way send files to an Arduino?
- by: Pat Deegan
- On
There are many instances when it would be nice to be able to send large amounts of data to an Arduino-based device. A very obvious example is any kind of media player, where you’d like to upload files from your computer, but there’s also sending configuration, whitelists, sets of instructions… there are many cases where…
Servo-controlled turntable
- by: Pat Deegan
- On
I have an ongoing project that requires a controllable rotating platter and, in order to get sufficient torque and control, I’ve been playing with servo motors to get this working (which is how I fried my faithful little power supply, and wound up needing to construct a new bench supply). To let the small servo…
Quick Hack: old-school bench power supply
- by: Pat Deegan
- On
I went out to do a beta demonstration at a client’s office, last Thursday, and brought along the prototype circuit boards as well as a small variable power supply. As I was setting up and pulled out the power supply–a functional but somewhat shoddy little black box with red and black alligator clips–I remarked that…
MaxThermo: temperature measurements for your projects
- by: Pat Deegan
- On
The MaxThermo library has just been released under the LGPL! If you have a project that needs to know the weather (or at least the temperature, anyhow), then a thermocouple will come in very handy. Thermocouples are pretty sweet temperature sensors that fit into electronics naturally as they leverage the thermoelectric effect: conductors which are…
Ardweeny vs Sippino: Tiny Arduino-compatible comparison
- by: Pat Deegan
- On
I’m a big fan of Atmel AVR-based projects, Arduino stuff in particular. Though I support the Arduino community by buying and using official parts, like the Uno, I also enjoy exploring spin-off projects such as the Digispark because they sometimes better address particular needs (e.g. space constraints). Also, I like to play. Here I’ll review…
How to roll your own programmable Arduino/AVR board
- by: Pat Deegan
- On
Arduinos are perfect for development: you just plug them into a USB port and all the old hassles of dealing with AVR chips (crystals for clocking, hooking up comm lines, regulating power…) are handled for you. But sometimes you need to roll your own custom solution. In real life–whether because of size, cost or power…
No Ferric Chloride? No problem: Home-made etchant to the rescue!
- by: Pat Deegan
- On
It was 11pm and I was on a roll. Having prototyped my little circuit and transferred the mask onto a copper board, I was ready to create a nice permanent PCB version of the module. Far from perfect transfer, but enough to do the job. The only problem? No Ferric Chloride anywhere in sight. …
Controlling High Voltage Loads Using a Microcontroller
- by: Pat Deegan
- On
A while back, I had a project that required high-side switching of a set of pneumatic valves by a microcontroller. Because the loads were inductive (solenoids) and required a good deal more voltage than the microcontroller supply to activate (24V), I needed some kind of middleware between the Arduino and the valves. I created a…