Microcontrollers

This AddOhms episode is part 3 of the “design your own Arduino” series. In this one I populate a bare PCB, reflow solder it, debug a few issues, and load the Uno bootloader. …

One of the best ways to learn how to use a new piece of test equipment is to use it. Sounds easy, right? The problem is, sometimes when you are in the middle of troubleshooting …

Whenever someone sends me some code that doesn’t work, there are a few common Arduino programming mistakes that I check. Some of these mistakes I make myself. In most cases my code …

Almost all microcontroller (and microprocessor) development systems use some form of a bootloader. Often called firmware, mistakenly, the Arduino bootloader is one example. Since …

Last week I had a detailed Arduino tutorial on software pulse width modulation using millis() and micros(). Why? Because I wanted to create a Proper Larson Scanner, with …

The Gecko Zero EFM32 Weather Station Evaluation Board from Silicon Labs is intended to show off the low-energy or energy harvesting capabilities of the EFM32 Zero. The ARM-based …

What happens when you have a random chip or sensor you want to interface with an Arduino, but don’t know how? You search for a pre-existing library of course. And where are many …

Warning, the title of this post is a little bit misleading. It isn’t just one-click to get cleanly formatted code, it’s actually two. There are two things seasoned programmers will …

When most people say “Arduino” they mean an ATmega328 based board like the Uno. This means a simple 8-bit microcontroller with only 2K of RAM. That’s 2,048 bytes of memory to work …

There is one mistake that all C programmers make, regardless of experience. You’ll do it often when you get started, but never completely stop. The mistake? Confusing the …