Another one bites the chips

This is a follow up to an old post about milling plastics which, on the hype of Marvel movies, ended with a lightweight promise of a solution. Well, that promise was fulfilled over six months ago, when we (my fellow makers and me) released an open source hardware and software project called OtheRPM, promoting it …

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 …

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 …

nRF24 walk through – Sensors’ firmware

Let's move to the 3rd part of the nRF24 walk through series before the excitement cools off, shall we? Now that I have three boards wired and I'm certain only my code can break things up, it is time to create the sensors' firmware. It should be quite simple: all we need to do is getting the …

Arduino analogRead pitfalls

I've just published a small, open source, Arduino library to sense battery level in Arduino projects and, while writing the readme file, I found myself trapped explaining the reasons behind some decisions. While I believe those might be valuable, I believe they deserve a post as they have a broader range of application than the …

nRF24 on Raspberry Pi

NOTE This post has been quite successful, so I decided to publish a complete series on nRF24 transceivers. I'm working on a home automation project and I'm planning to use my Raspberry Pi as central node of a network of cheap nRF24 nodes. First thing is to get the necessary compilation tools, something quite easy to …