It’s 3am but you are not going to bed until you squash this last bug. You sprinkle Serial.print() statements everywhere you can think of, and then that’s when all hell breaks loose: Your code randomly locks up, the LEDs go crazy, and you’ve had it. What’s going on? You’ve run out of RAM!
The Arduino IDE includes a “Serial Monitor” which is decent for basic serial communication. However, when you need real time serial interaction or data logging capabilities, that’s when one of these serial monitor alternatives can come in handy.
Arduino boards have microcontrollers with notoriously small amounts of RAM. The Uno only has 2,048 bytes of static RAM available for your program to store variables. So when you need to keep non-changing variables out of RAM which is best to use const or #define?
All Arduino boards have GPIO pins with digital and analog capabilities. The Arduino pinMode() function determines how the pins will operate. A surprise might be that in some cases it is not necessary to use it. And when you do, pinMode() may not always work the way you expect. This post outlines how the Arduino pinMode() function works and when you should (or not should) use it.
pinMode(13, OUTPUT);
Tantalum is a really misunderstood capacitor. Well, all capacitors are misunderstood, but that’s a subject for another post. I ran across this post on the Arduino forums on the Arduino GSM shield. In the post, ddewaele, reports that the shield blew up, catching fire. At first some might think it was due to abuse by the user. While it is possible that reversing the polarity or applying over-voltage could cause a catastrophic failure, it is also possible that the user doing nothing wrong could result in the same failure mode!
Wait, what? So what gives? Well, there’s two things to understand. First, Tantalum doesn’t explode. It takes almost 2000°C before Tantalum metal will ignite. Okay, so if Tantalum doesn’t explode what is ddawaele seeing? It’s the cathode material, Manganese Dioxide, (MnO2) that is exploding…
