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Submitted by matt on Sat, 23/12/2017 - 16:48
Vacuum Fluorescent Displays are probably one of the coolest displays of all time. Certainly one of the most popular of recent history. Developed in 1959 by Philips they have endured right through to modern times. You can even still find them in current consumer electronics.
Submitted by matt on Fri, 02/06/2017 - 17:39
It's not always obvious how to configure the WiFi on the Arduino Yùn properly, since most of the good settings are hidden away in the "advanced" interface. So I'll do what I can to expose them to you.
First off, when messing with the WiFi, you really want to be connected to the Yùn using an Ethernet cable (you most probably had one provided with your WiFi router when you got it - it's buried at the bottom of a drawer somewhere).
Submitted by matt on Fri, 19/05/2017 - 16:50
As part of my work I end up with hundreds of small TFT and OLED displays scattered around doing nothing. One of them, the PG25664CG OLED screen (16 shades of green) I figured would be about the same size and shape as a 5.25" drive bay in a PC.
And guess what? I was right! An absolutely (well, a couple of mm out) perfect match. So I decided I should build one into my computer to display stuff. No idea what stuff yet, but stuff anyway. I'll decide later when I have written the software for it all.
Submitted by matt on Sat, 08/04/2017 - 16:32
A common question I often find is:
How can I split this incoming data into parts?
It's especially asked in conjunction with reading data through serial. So I thought I'd introduce you to two completely different approaches, each with benefits and drawbacks depending on the kind of data you are splitting.
So you have some data coming in through serial, or some similar stream, and you need to cut it up into different parts. The two methods basically consist of either:
Submitted by matt on Mon, 20/03/2017 - 15:18
I was hoping to make this the topic of my first ever video tutorial, but I still haven't got round to cleaning my desk of all the junk and setting up a holder for my phone to use as a camera. Plus I am suffering from a bad cold right now and sound awful. So text it is.
I'd like to help you get to know exactly what a digital IO pin of an Arduino actually is and how it works. Many questions I come across along the lines of "How does this work", or "Why do you need to do this", or similar, can be answered easily if you know exactly what goes on inside an IO pin.
Submitted by matt on Wed, 14/12/2016 - 15:11
So I heard you were thinking about designing your own development board. That's nice. But do you know how?
It's one thing to go "I'd like to build my own development board", but it's quite a long step from there to "I have built my own development board and it works".
There's a number of steps you should go through before you even set pen to paper.
Why build another development board?
Submitted by matt on Tue, 06/12/2016 - 15:08
A lot of the time on the Arduino forums we get questions regarding wiring things together. One common format is:
I want to connect my 12V powered LED strip to my Arduino but I can't get it to communicate. I have checked all the connections and they seem fine. I have a 12V power supply for the LEDs and the Arduino is powered from the computer.
And 9 times out of 10 the first question we have to ask in return is:
Have you connected the grounds together?
Submitted by matt on Fri, 18/11/2016 - 15:03
I decided the other day that it would be a good idea to spend 99p on a 433MHz transmitter and receiver pair from eBay. Not to use, but to take a look and see just how bad these modules are (and I expected them to be pretty awful too).
Submitted by matt on Fri, 02/09/2016 - 15:54
I'd like to introduce you to a method of fading RGB LEDs both smoothly and flexibly.
A common method of fading colours on the Arduino is to use simple for loops, such as:
Submitted by matt on Tue, 30/08/2016 - 15:49
People, all the time, use a simple resistor-based voltage divider to change 5v into 3.3v. You see it all over the place. For instance, when you want to get your 5V Arduino to communicate with a 3.3V ESP8266 - you use two resistors (10K and 22K say) to drop the 5V of the Arduino down to the 3.3V the ESP8266 expects.
And that is all fine and dandy.
Submitted by matt on Tue, 30/08/2016 - 15:26
 I thought I would take a look inside a power supply that I suspected was a counterfeit. See just what is going on with it. This Samsung power supply was making strange things happen with my phone while it was plugged in. Yes, it charged the phone fine, but it made the touch screen go all screwy, and I suspected it was a rather noisy switcher in it. I had bought it from eBay for next to nothing, so I am expecting it to be somewhat nasty inside.
Guess what? I was right.
Submitted by matt on Wed, 24/08/2016 - 15:20
Getting Arduino and Arduino-like boards working properly under Linux can be a troublesome task if you are not familiar with how Linux works.
So I am going to introduce you to some of the basic tools you will need to work out why your board isn't working as you'd like it to work.
Submitted by matt on Tue, 16/08/2016 - 15:13
 I thought the other day I would grab a couple of these cheap little LED volt & amp meters modules you see on eBay. 30V, 10A, red and blue LED displays. Funky little things. I felt I should take a look at them and see just what they are, what they do, how you use them, etc.
Now of course, true to form, the details on eBay are very sketchy about how to use them. This is all it has to say on the page I bought mine from about the wiring:
Submitted by matt on Fri, 12/08/2016 - 14:47
The Arduino (and many other boards) have a very useful time-and-cost saving feature ideal for when you are working with buttons and switches - namely internal pull-up resistors on the GPIO pins which can be enabled / disabled at will in software. This means you don't have to clutter your board up with pull-up resistors of your own for all the buttons and things, and also means they can be turned off and on to give your design much more flexibility.
But nowhere can you find out actually what the resistance of these resistors are. Why not? Simply because nobody knows.
Submitted by matt on Tue, 31/05/2016 - 14:41
I don't know about you, but I have a huge pile of different Arduino-like boards here. (I have so many because I need to test UECIDE with them - or that's what I tell the "bank manager"). Many is the time I will have more than one of them plugged in to my computer. Often times I have programmed one of them with some code only to find it's not worked - and why hasn't it worked? Because I have had the wrong serial port selected in the IDE.
Submitted by matt on Fri, 25/03/2016 - 13:21
Logging data on an Arduino is very much a trivial every-day task. Connect an SD card, open a file, and start printing data to it.
For many people that is good enough. It results in nice easily readable (by us humans) data.
But it's not fast. It's not efficient. It's perfectly fine for things like logging temperature every hour, or barometric pressure every 5 minutes, etc. But when you have large amounts of data to store very rapidly you have to think a little differently.
Submitted by matt on Wed, 23/03/2016 - 12:58
So many people starting out in electronics, especially beginning to dabble in the world of Arduino and similar boards, just don't have the basic equipment to do the job properly. And not only that, they don't even know what the basic equipment is.
So here's a list of things you should have on your desk no matter if you have just got your first Arduino or if, like me, you are a seasoned veteran.
Submitted by matt on Wed, 24/02/2016 - 01:01
My latest acquisition, the Dragino Yun Shield is actually quite a nice bit of kit. It's the Linux portion of an Arduino Yun placed on a shield, so you can attach it to any board of your choosing.
It provides both a UART and an SPI connection to whatever it is plugged in to. And that includes chipKIT boards.
Submitted by matt on Wed, 24/02/2016 - 00:00
... and maybe the real Yun too.
So there's the Arduino Yun. That's quite a nice concept - an embedded Linux computer (MIPS based, YAY!) and microcontroller combined on one board. Just such a shame it's an Atmel microcontroller and not a PIC32.
Submitted by matt on Thu, 04/02/2016 - 00:00
Everyone, when they're starting out on the Arduino and similar boards, learns to use the String object for working with text. Or they think they do.
Well, you should forget all you think you have learned about using Strings on the Arduino, because it is all wrong.
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