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.

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?

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?

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).

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:

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.