Othermill Pro – Plastic

It's a couple of months now the Othermill Pro is beautifully sitting on my desk and after having milled a few PCBs and showed off with my family and friends I feel dauntless enough to try something new. I've got a small selection of end-mills and I didn't want to break them all straight away …

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Github project website

This is nothing new, but apparently not many Github users know about this feature and I've recently learnt an easy way to set it up. But let's step back for a second: what are Github pages? it's a web space granted to each Github user and project where you can publish anything related to the …

FlexiPower: the interview

Following the enthusiasm of my previous post, I wish to share an interview a good friend of mine gave to me the latest days of August for his own blog. The original interview run in Italian, but here I'm posting an English translation: thank you Francesco for pushing me into learning Arduino!  Zeirus: Hi Roberto. …

Am I a Meta Maker™?

Yesterday has been a special day for me. It started as any other day of my recent life, with a late alarm after a too short sleep. As usual I had my morning shower and rushed into the office were I spent my day working together with the other members of my team and running …

The Evils of Arduino Strings

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 know about strings … Source: The Evils of Arduino Strings

Programming an ATmega328

Ever heard about Barebone Arduino? It consists of trimming down an Arduino to it's very basic parts and can be really effective in cost reduction. Even it might seem the simplest version of an Arduino (actually I wouldn't be calling it an Arduino any more) we can go even further and drop the external crystal in …

USBasp & Windows 10

  If you have an USBasp programmer and a recent Windows machine you have more than probably stumbled into a disappointing message, either from Arduino IDE or Sloeber: avrdude: error: could not find USB device with vid=0x16c0 pid=0x5dc vendor='www.fischl.de' product='USBasp' I believe I've spent at least a couple of hours searching for a solution which would not …

Markdown with Yada Wiki and Jetpack

In the office we have recently decide to migrate our team wiki to WordPress and Yada Wiki has been selected. The team is also quite comfortable with Markdown, even if not everybody is ready to adopt it as the main editor, so I struggled a bit to find a solution, until I stumbled upon Jetpack. …

Win 10 FTDIgate solved!

My recent upgrade to Windows 10 has brought back to me an old issue: FTDI drivers. Yes, I've bought cheap Chinese Arduino clones, mostly small boards to use in my projects as the official ones are quite expensive. I never had problems on my previous Windows 7 install: even if I knew I was probably …

Cucumber is NOT a testing framework!

I have been repeating this statement over and over on the Cucumber forum, but apparently with no good result. To me this is a simple statement and I fail to understand what's difficult to understand in its simplicity: Cucumber (JVM, Ruby, C, the flavour doesn't matter) is not a testing framework. I'll try to further explain …