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 …
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, …
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’ »
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’ »
In an attempt to get back into blogging about my Raspberry Pi and microcontroller projects I have been looking through my collection of parts and kits, to see what I can make, or at very least assemble. One of the kits I bought a few months ago was a “prototino“. This is essentially an Arduino …
I’m a bit of a sucker for cheap little electronics. After playing around with single LEDs and traffic lights for a while I wanted something a bit more interesting, so just over a pound for an “8 Channel Flowing Water Light LED DIY Kit” seemed too much fun to pass up. The circuit is very …
Continue reading ‘Building and testing a “flowing water light”’ »
After my previous post on delimiter-free languages it occurred to me that the idea of txtzyme has merit for communication between some of the devices I have to hand. Some while ago I spent some time producing some bare-metal code examples for the Raspberry Pi (flashing morse code, GPIO control and uart stuff, for example), …