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Arduino

Arduino UNO SMD Amnesia

MRI Amnesia

On the Janurary 15, 2011 edition of Adafruit’s “Ask An Engineer” live video chat, I heard LadyAda mention something about “Arduino Amnesia.”  After investing the situation a little further, it turns out there are some Issues with the new Arduino UNO Smd edition.

A bug in the new bootloader can be triggered on power-cycle causing the SMD version of the board to not load the previously stored sketch.  The good news is there is already a fix for the bug.  Either return the board to your Official Distributor or use a ISP to program the new bootloader.

Issues (if I could even use that word) like this makes Open Source Hardware fun!

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Arduino

millis() Tutorial: Arduino Multitasking

After working through these exercises, check out this article on how to avoid rollover or reset mills().

After learning how to flash a single LED on your Arduino, you are probably looking for a way to make cool patterns, but feel limited by the use of delay(). If you ask in the forums, you get told to look at the “Blink Without Delay” example. This example introduces the idea of replacing delay() with a state machine. If you’re confused how to use it, this tutorial is setup to take you from blinking two LEDs with delay, to using an alternate method, right down to how you can use millis().

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Around The Web

iPad/Arduino Controlled KegBot, by Yelp

Engineers at Yelp have put together an Arduino and iPad controlled Keg-o-rator.  By swiping their RFID they can track how much a person is drinking, collect statistics about how others enjoyed the beer (by rating it), and maintain a leader-board of the office.  Everything used in the project is based on off-the-self components.  My guess is that they are communicating between the iPad and Arduino over the iPod Dock’s i2c interface.  It looks like they are using the PodGizmo iPod Dock Conntector Breakout board available at Kinetka Systems.  Drink up!

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8x6 Matrix Shield

8×6 LED Matrix Shield for Ardiuno

This is a quick video demonstrating the LED Matrix Shield for the Arduino.  This Matrix is an 8×6 “Normal” matrix.  (It is not Chairleplexed.)  Blue LEDs were used to give it a brilliant hue and to provide another source of light in dimly lit apartment homes.  Only one row of the Matrix is lit up at one time.  This is done to save power and because the ATMega processor of the Arduino cannot source or sink more than 200mA of current.

Update 10/6/2012:  Project page now available.

The scrolling message can be any string of characters between ASCII 32 and 255. The font is a 8×6 font based on 5×7 characters.  Click below to see a picture of the Shield sitting on top of an Arduino.

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Around The Web

Flexible Print Circuit version of Arduino

FPC ArduinoThe folks over at Seedstudio have created a first for Arduino:  a FPC version!  In the past, it was very common for this material to be used as interconnects between circuit boards in production products.  The flexibility makes it simple to use and the ability to attach components directly saves space.  These are just prototypes, but Seeedstudio is looking for ideas to help move into higher volume production.  Who is going to make the first Arduino watch?

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