Category: Arduino

How to Teach Yourself to Program with Arduino

Most people begin their journey to programming with a lot of dilemmas. While others are worried about the programming languages they should learn, others can’t pick on a specific programming framework to start with. If you don’t have any of the above worries, you might be wondering if getting an education in programming will get you hired. Regardless, all these are good questions that need answers before you settle into coding. Without a doubt, programming is a career. However, it doubles up as an essential tool and skill in the current era. Fortunately, unlike other professions, you don’t necessarily need a college degree to excel in coding, as you can learn it individually. That said, the best place to begin is choosing a coding language. The guide below outlines how to learn to program with the Arduino language.

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An Arduino based IC tester with smart touch

Electronic components can be tested to ensure that they meet certain specifications or to diagnose problems in a circuit. The specific tests performed on electronic components depend on the type of component being tested and the function it is intended to perform. For example, resistors can be tested for their resistance value, capacitors can be tested for their capacitance value, and transistors can be tested for their amplification and switching capabilities. Some of the limitations of electronic component testing include the accuracy of the test equipment and the difficulty of testing some components in-circuit. For example, testing a capacitor for its capacitance value may require removing it from the circuit, which can be time-consuming and may not be practical in some cases. Additionally, some electronic components may be sensitive to environmental factors, such as temperature and humidity, which can affect their performance and make testing more challenging.

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Gearbest review: Setting up an Arduino workplace

Arduino has evolved into a popular development platform with various boards, shields, and strong community. Its simplicity and robustness allow tweaking, designing, and building things even if you have little or no experienced in electronics and microcontrollers. Today Arduino comes in many different shapes and processing power. Gearbest team was so kind to supply Arduino Mega 2560 R3 featuring ATmega2560 microcontroller. This is most powerful AVR-based Arduino having 54 I/Os, 256KB flash, 4KB of SRAM, and 4KB of EEPROM.

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Arduino and Matlab scope project

Oscilloscope is quite a universal instrument which I would recommend to invest first. Normal bench scope does the job pretty well. I am not a big fan of DIY scopes that are built of microcontroller and LCD or interfaced to PC via the serial interface. You will never get decent sampling and functionality with low-end parts. But in other hand, building such scope can be fun and be a good choice for student projects. prem_ranjan shares his Arduino-based scope project, where he outputs waveform to MATLAB plots. The investment into this project is minimal. O course you could capture signal directly to Arduino analog pin, but op-amp based signal conditioning could make life easier. In the end, here are few features of this scope:

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Half duplex UART from single AVR pin

Smaller microcontrollers like Attiny84 microcontrollers don’t have UART interfaces, and you may not need them in many cases. But if you want a USART option, you will need to use software USART library or write your own routines. You can find many great software USART libraries for that purpose. As a rule, you will have to use two pins to establish communication. But if you are tight on I/Os, you can cheat a little and make it work from a single pin. Ralph has been experimenting with the simple but intelligent circuit, which allows performing half duplex UART communications with other systems. The whole trick lies in a small schematic made of diode, transistor and resistor. Diode is only for making one way TX signal path from MCU to other device. The resistor is only for limiting base current. All is left a transistor which works as a key. We need to remember that when the serial line is inactive, it stays in the high state. So when microcontroller transmits data, TX on the right keeps transistor open. Thus if…

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