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.

Continue reading

What’s so Great About Fiber Optic?

There is a lot to think about when it comes to choosing an internet provider for your business needs. Beyond just the cost and speed, you also need to think about the type of internet technology available in your area. That is the infrastructure upon which the service is built. In recent years, a lot of attention has been placed on fiber optic internet. Several significant providers have started offering fiber optic access in addition to the standard cable and DSL options. Additionally, companies like Google are starting to build their fiber optic networks. But what is fiber optic, and what makes it different from, or better than, cable or DSL?

Continue reading

Implementing precise single shots with AVR timer

Microcontroller timers are meant to count clock cycles in hardware, and there are many ways and configurations where timers are handy. First of all, timers are meant to work purely in hardware without utilizing CPU. Secondly, timers help generate waveforms like PWM, trigger events, count the time between events, etc. But there is one use that, in most cases, is missed and not documented – precise single shots that allow generating only a single pulse shot with precise length. And this method doesn’t require CPU to be involved – just set and forget. The idea of this method lies in using fast PWM (refer to datasheet for more info) mode a bit differently. Normally in this mode timer works by counting to TOP value; somewhere in between, there is a MATCH value where timer outputs HIG and drops to LOW when TOP is counted. This way, there is a PWM signal generated. Josh came up with the idea that, in this case, we can generate only single pulse by setting MATCH value above the TOP and setting the initial timer…

Continue reading