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…

Read more

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…

Read more

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…

Read more

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…

Read more

Announcing the release of a new hardware project :) A.C.I.D. (the Aural Colour Identification Device) lets you hear all the colours of the rainbow, by converting any light it receives into a unique combination of tones. It may be used as a handheld device or as an input module to other components by providing numerical…

Read more

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…

Read more

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…

Read more

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.  …

Read more

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…

Read more

VaRGB, a powerful and rather fun bit of code, has gone public and is now available as OSS. VaRGB is an RGB illumination programming library. You tell it how you want your lighting to behave, and it handles all the details of updating red/green/blue values at the right time for you. The library works on…

Read more