Over the last few years I have written and edited many Arduino sketches. Aside from a brief dalliance with Sublime Text I have exclusively used the dull but ubiquitous Arduino IDE. At the time I started each project this seemed completely natural, but over time I seem to somehow lose track of where I put …
I’ve not blogged here for a few days. Unfortunately my “real job” got very busy. In the meanwhile I received another package of bits I had ordered from China weeks ago and mostly forgotten about ;) Among other things in this package were some clone Arduino Mini Pro boards. These little boards have a SMD …
Continue reading ‘Arduino Mini Pro and ultrasonic distance sensor’ »
You’d think I would be fed up with Arduinos after all that messing about with one connected to a Raspberry Pi, but while playing with that it occurred to me that some months ago I had bought a nicely cheap Arduino board kit (Xino Basic for Atmel), assembled it, but not managed to program it, …
Yesterday I went along to another meeting of the Ipswich Makerspace. This time we were in a larger hall at Holy Trinity Church, just across from the small room we met in last time. We had a few more people turn up, but there’s still plenty of room to grow! This week we had a …
Continue reading ‘A new meeting place for the Ipswich Makerspace’ »
After several attempts ( blogged here, here, and here ) at getting an Atmel AVR chip on a daughter board to communicate with a Raspberry Pi, I am now excited to report that I have it working. I turned out here were several things wrong: I needed to stop the Raspberry Pi serial port console …
Continue reading ‘Arduino serial communication finally working’ »
So I’m still banging my head against the difficulty of making a simple serial connection between my Raspberry Pi and an ATMega chip on a daughter board. And I still have not got it working properly. Overnight it occurred to me that I ought to have turned off the serial port login on the Raspberry …
Yesterday I wrote about how I managed to get an “Arduino” (or at least the AVR ATMega328 chip which powers one) attached to and programmed by my Raspberry Pi. However exciting a blinking LED may be, though, it’s not much use if the only way to change its behaviour is to completely re-program the chip. …
This is, after all, supposed to be a blog about Raspberry Pi. With all the stuff about Arduino and Atmel AVR chips, you might think I have wandered off. However, just to prove that Pi and ‘Duino work well together, here’s how I hand-built a board to sit on the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins and …
As I mentioned at the end of my previous Arduino post, I want to build my “learning timer” into a stand-alone project, with its own battery and enclosure. While I could just transfer the circuit exactly as it is to some proto board, I thought I’d take the opportunity to see how much more I …
Continue reading ‘Simpler than a Shrimp – Arduino with no crystal’ »
A few days ago I wrote about a “learning timer” that I had built using an Arduino Uno. Arduino boards are pretty easy to come by, and also easy to work with, but can be a bit expensive to build in to things (a genuine Arduino Uno from the manufacturer will set you back 20 …
Continue reading ‘Building my own Arduino: shrimp and ArduinoISP’ »