Here’s a really interesting documentary devoted to Arduino project. It explains how the idea began and why its creators decided to spread it out freely. There are also demonstrations of some smart devices based on Arduino. You can watch it on the Arduino Documentary page in english (except for some spanish snippets, english subbed) or […]
Author Archives: markal
Puff – The Magic Firefighter
This is Puff, Magic Fire Fighting Dragon Puff consists of: Arduino chassis and two motors servo moving its head motor with a fan two photoresistors as fire detectors The result? Autonomic robot (this means, controlled only by software from Arduino) detecting fire (this means, a bright light) and trying to put it out. It recognizes […]
Arduino SMS and not only
GSM module for Arduino lets you convert it into a cell phone :) Well, somewhere about a cell phone. Let’s start from the beginning. First, we need the the module and a valid SIM card. The first issue – power. The GSM module is quite demanding in this regard. Not every USB port provides enough […]
Programming the Arduino Pro Mini with USB Mini
Everyone, who has been making a project based on Arduino probably wanted the board to be smaller than the basic unit. A variety of smaller, but compatible with Arduino, boards have been developed. One of them is SparkFun’s Arduino Pro Mini. Currently, it has ATmega328 onboard and its dimensions are 33 mm x 18 mm. […]
Remember the colours – a game
The following article is based on this entry on Newton’s blog (in Polish). All the pictures, program code and the video clip came from there. This project’s goal was to use as many parts from the Arduino Starter Kit, as possible. So, what is this project exactly? As the title itself suggests, it’s a game, […]
How to connect switches
Switches (buttons, pushbuttons, tact switches) are commonly used with Arduino. But, for beginners, it’s sometimes irritating when it comes to wire them up correctly. Some of their terminals are shorted with each other. Such a switch doesn’t work if putted in reversely. Because of that, here’s some words of explanation. For instance, we have a […]
Arduino UNO as a joystick
It was pretty predictable. One of the new Ardiuno UNO features is a re-programmable USB communication chip. On the Arduino forum appeared a solution for loading custom firmware on this chip with the joystick as an example. So, after loading this firmware and connecting to PC, Arduino will be detected as joystick, not as serial […]
I want more digital outputs!
Arduino offers quite a few digital outputs, but sometimes you want even more… When a keypad and LCD are connected, it doesn’t remain much free outputs. Today I found out a simple solution for that – EZ Expander shield. The shield utilises two shift registers, 74HC595 to ‘multiply’ digital outputs. Of course, the additional outputs […]
Hall effect sensor
Hall effect sensor is a sensor utilizing the Hall effect to measure magnetic field. Briefly speaking, it’s about diference in voltage charges within a conductor placed in magnetic field. CS3144E available in Nettigo store is a Hall effect sensor in TO-92UA package. It consists of voltage regulator, Hall voltage generator, differential amplifier and Schmitt trigger. […]
Secret keylock – with Arduino
I’ve seen many electronic keylocks, but this project is probably unique :) In a nutshell – Arduino listens to knocking on a door and, if you are knocking with a specific rhythm, then it unlocks the door. Along with this, a simple method of learning the new cipher and it’s finished :) If someone is […]