Category Archives: Hardware

Crash course: Embedded programming with Arduino

Posted on December 20, 2011 by tuxcarla| Leave a comment

Please enjoy my fast and furious introduction to the wonderful Arduino embedded platform and electronics hackery: Crash course: Embedded programming with Arduino.

Demand for embedded programming is growing like crazy, so anyone looking for some job security might consider becoming an ace embedded programmer. It helps to have some programming experience, but even raw beginners can get started inexpensively and learn on their own. One of the friendliest introductions to embedded coding is Arduino. Arduino is a popular open embedded hardware and software platform with hundreds of howtos and projects to try out. Today we review the basics of both electronics and Arduino coding in a fun holiday project, Singing Holiday Snowman.

I’m going to take my old plastic snowman (figure 1) and outfit him to sing holiday songs whenever anyone approaches within a few feet, and to blink some festive red and green LEDs. (Half the fun of Arduino is blinky lights.) You, of course, may use any object you want

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Posted in Developer, embedded, Hardware, Linux Audio, software

8 strange places to find USB ports

Posted on June 2, 2011 by tuxcarla| Leave a comment

USB ports have become the universal computer interface. Why do we care? Because microcontrollers control the world, making the question of who controls the microcontrollers very important. Your car has dozens of microcontrollers — possibly more than a hundred. Farm machinery, appliances, toys, weapons, home theater equipment, cameras, model trains, industrial robots, dog collars, surveillance gear — they’re everywhere.

There has to be a way to interface with microcontrollers. Sometimes this is the realm of programmers and engineers with specialized equipment. Sometimes they are user-accessible, and an easy and common interface is the good old USB port. For this I am happy, because I remember the painful bad old days of device connectivity. You young’uns won’t believe me, but we couldn’t just plug external hard drives or USB sticks into computers. We couldn’t plug cameras and smartphones into computers, or turntables, speakers, headsets, multi-channel recording interfaces — not even keyboards and mice. No, this was a strange and difficult task, and involved hassling with PS/2 ports, serial ports, parallel ports, IDE ports, and other primitive technologies.

Now there are USB ports everywhere, and here are eight of the strangest places I have seen them.

Posted in Hardware