brainwagon

As the holiday approaches, it seems like making some kind of blinkenlights project would allow some fun hacking, but also be within the spirit of the holiday. I encountered the idea of “CheerLights” during my morning surfing. The basic idea is to create a global network of colored Christmas lights, all of which change color […]

I didn’t get a lot of electronics hacking done, but I found myself again playing with capacitive sensing. I found this interesting article on the EE Times website: The art of capacitive touch sensing It also pointed me at the following pretty cool Youtube! vid by the folks at Nerdkits: My experimentation thus far has […]

I was driving around various Silicon Valley electronics and surplus stores (like HSC and Anchor Electronics) and decided to stop in at Microcenter. I remembered that they supposedly were beginning to stock items from Sparkfun and the Maker Shed. And, indeed they do! I found a Serial LCD module from Sparkfun that I thought might […]

Lee mentioned that the there was a way to change the analog reference used on the analog inputs to the Atmel AVR to an internally generated 1.1V, which would give me a lot greater resolution (about little over 1mV per step). Indeed, a little quick searching yielded that it was not only true, but dead […]

I had an application where I wanted to detect temperature. No big deal, lots of good temperature sensors exist. But of course, I don’t have any of those. Rather than order something from sparkfun, I thought I’d just try to see what I could do with the stuff I had on hand. What I had […]

I’ve been playing a great deal with Arduinos lately, and have acquired a couple of Xbees to experiment with wireless. But Xbees, cool as they are, are kind of expensive for many tasks where a much simple RF link could suffice. Today, I ran across the JeeNode, which is available as a kit from Modern […]

I’m pretty much near the end of where I wanted to be for the Arduino/Gameduino project: all the major functions that I originally wanted to include are in and working. I’ll be doing a video about it shortly, so I’ve begun to think about what my next project could be. While doing this project, I […]

I had an idea for a project that doesn’t require a full Arduino: a small 8 pin processor would work just fine. But how to program them? It turns out you can use an Arduino as a programmer. Check out the instructions: High-Low Tech – Programming an ATtiny w/ Arduino Sadly, I only have the […]

I was going to tidy up my breadboard layout for the satellite tracker I’ve been working on, and I thought it might be nice to use some software to test out various layouts. It also has the side effect of documenting the circuit, at least minimally. I decided to give Fritzing a try, which is […]

In seeking some more details on the inner workings of the Wire library for the Arduino, I chanced across this rather informative link on the Arduino Playground website: Arduino playground – WireLibraryDetailedReference Of particular interest to me was the description how requestFrom worked. It doesn’t just issue the request: it calls the low level twi_readFrom() […]

I noticed something while reading code that uses the Wire library for the Arduino, such as you might find below… Arduino playground – I2CEEPROM Check out this two line fragment from the read function: for ( c = 0; c < length; c++ ) if (Wire.available()) buffer[c] = Wire.receive(); Is anyone else struck by the […]

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The great thing about doing a real project like my satellite tracker is that it makes you learn a lot, in a whole lot of different areas. In other words, it’s good exercise! And thus, it is good when you discover something doesn’t quite work right: you have another opportunity to learn. Well, today, something […]

There is a lot to like about the Arduino, but I can’t help but think that the existing library system removes some of the power that the AVR could supply in its effort to handhold new users. I’m not the only one: the guys over at makehackvoid.com have written a new set of runtime libraries […]

I need to think up a better name for this project. Calling it the “Arduino/Gameduino Satellite Tracker” is just too damned cumbersome for words. Progress was slow today. I woke up around 4:00AM with a sore throat and a miserable cough. A quick trip to the urgent care clinic when it opened reassured me that […]