brainwagon

Last night, I met with Nanode creator Ken Boak and Chris Jefferies from tinajalabs.com at Cafe Actual in Berkeley for the inaugural IoTBayArea meetup. IoT groups are already going strong in many cities like London, Amsterdam, and NYC, but now that Ken is operating here in the SF Bay Area, he wanted to get a […]

I’ve been kind of busy and distracted lately, so I haven’t had much time to get any embedded microcontrollers. I did dust off an Arduino FIO that I never played with, and charged up a 1000maH LiPo battery to power it. While it was blinking, I dug out my Xbees and started thinking of a […]

The microcontrollers of today are in many ways superior to the simple eight bit computers that I learned to program as a teenager, but one way in which most of them are decidedly inferior is that they have only a very limited number of actual peripherals. After all, even my simplest Atari 400 back in […]

Yesterday I was looking (sadly unsuccessfully) for some BPW32 photodiodes that I know I have somewhere, when I ran across some of 434 Mhz transmitter modules from Sparkfun (now a retired part) that I had never used. These little $4 transmitters are commonly used for remote-keyless access or similar applications. They have just four pins: […]

Roger, G3XBM built a simple beacon for light communication using a K1EL beacon keyer chip and a handful of other components. I didn’t have any of those chips around, but I did have some Atmel ATtiny13s lying around. I hacked this simple program together to send Morse code in two different ways: on pin PB1 […]

Last night’s hacking adventure was inspired by a couple of recent posts from Roger, G3XBM having to do with light based communication. The first was his simple beacon design: it’s just a keyer chip, a MOSFET, a voltage regulator, and some (beefy) current limiting resistors. Roger used this beacon to do some non-line-of-sight communications via […]

Okay, I finally got some time to record a video about a simple little webserver project I hacked together earlier this week. My wife Carmen got me a Nanode kit from Wicked Device around Christmas. These are Arduino compatible development boards which include a Microchip ENC28J60 Ethernet device to enable web connectivity. One slight drawback […]

Ken Boak was nice enough to gift me with a pair of Nanodes when he was out visiting last month. Much to my embarrassment, I haven’t had much time to play with them, so tonight I tried to do a bit more research to figure out how I could use them in some more advanced […]

A couple of my projects have used the tiniest of the Atmel ATtiny chips: the ATtiny13. I have written one or two programs in assembler for these chips, but I prefer to work with avr-gcc whenever possible. What’s amazing is that you actually can use a sophisticated C compiler to generate code for such a […]

In response to my previous post, @xek replied: https://twitter.com/#!/xek/status/163442298456260608 Well, the fact is I had heard of doing that. It’s not really hard to rig something that will convert the RS232 level from the GPS into TTL levels for the Arduino. It just takes a single transistor inverter: you rig an 10K resistor from the […]

I used to be an electrical engineer like you, then I took an arrow in the knee. (If you don’t get this, google for “arrow in the knee”, and guess what Xbox game I spent the morning and afternoon playing instead of working on something cool.) I’ve had a number of projects that could benefit […]

While researching something completely different, I found Adrian Freed’s very cool page with code to generate high quality sine waves using PWM on the Arduino. This code could serve as an audio frequency signal generator, or as the basis of a computer music project. It also demonstrates some non-trivial Arduino wizardry in dealing with PWM […]

I’ve been trying to do a bit more Arduino programming and interfacing lately. Nothing too difficult, but just trying to expand my junkbox and my skills so that I can quickly prototype new ideas and expand the kind of projects that I can tackle in the limited time that I seem to have for playing […]

This is just a plug for a cute little pair of gadgets that I got the other day.. If you are like me and use solderless breadboards to experiment with stuff on the Arduino, you end up with the Arduino and the breadboard connected by a hodge podge of wires, and if you accidently tug […]

First of all, I really like the Arduino. There are lots of reasons: great community, relatively inexpensive, wide hardware availability and variety, and often a good “impedance” match to projects. But there are a few design choices (both hardware and software) that can be a nuisance, especially as you try to push the limits of […]