Imagine, Make, Play!

I just wanted to share what team MAKE!, which I'm proud to be a member, has realized to showcase what can be done with a little inventive and modern digital fabrication tools. https://youtu.be/xgp4W1mW6AU From an idea to a working device I wish to sincerely thank my friends and fellow team members Sebastiano Ronzulli, Giovanni Pittacolo, …

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Prolific Driver Fix

After the FTDI gate it's time for the Prolific gate, another USB to TTL chip driver issue puts plenty of devices at risk of being trashed. Luckily the solution is pretty simple and well documented on this site.

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 …

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 …

nRF24 walk through – Introduction

The Nordic nRF24 is a family of silicon integrated radio transceivers operating in the 2.4GHz band, the most popular one being the nRF24L01. This is the core element of some extremely cheap module boards available in online stores like eBay, Aliexpress and Banggood. These boards do not provide WiFi (801.11) or Bluetooth connectivity (both in …

nRF24 walk through – Building the sensors

It's now time to physically build the sensor devices part of the nRF24 sensor network we are planning to build, so move to your electronics bench and pick some breadboards! From an electronics point of view each sensor node consists of: 1 Arduino (any low-end model will do, I will be using two nano and one pro …