Category Archives: Tutorials

How to solder like a pro

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Soldering is a skill that electronics newbies often find intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Jeff Keyzer, Mitch Altman, and Andy Nordgren put together an excellent guide called Soldering is Easy. It’s packed with information on how to make good solder joints. Better yet, it’s illustrated in comic book format, so every explanation comes with clear pictures on exactly how to do things.

If you’re new to electronics and circuits, check out the guide to get up and running in no time. Even if you’re experienced but feel like you could shake off some rust, give it a glance. Good soldering technique is a lifelong skill that saves time and energy by creating cleaner, more reliable projects.

Source: MightyOhm via Tinkerlog

Data logging with Arduino

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Super sweet sensor sexiness over the serial stream.

Tom Igoe’s blog code, circuits, and construction has posted a tutorial on how to log data from your Arduino and put it into your platform or format of choice. As Tom explains, there’s a few common pathways once you’ve read a sensor or accepted some other form of input:

  • Serial transmission to a personal computer, and serial capture to a file.
  • Saving data to an SD card mounted on the Arduino.
  • HTTP upload to pachube.com via an Ethernet shield or Ethernet Arduino.

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Microcontroller tutorial series: AVR and Arduino timer interrupts

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Tick tock goes the Arduino clock.

Does your program seem like it’s trying to do too much at once? Are you using a lot of delay() or while() loops that are holding other things up? If so, your project is a good candidate to use timers. In this tutorial, we’ll discuss AVR and Arduino timers and how to use them to write better code.

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Project setup to develop and debug for AVR

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Atmel AVR ATMega 1284 in a DIP socket.

Pete Brown, the lead of the Developer Guidance Community Team at Microsoft, has written a great post on how to properly prepare for a new AVR project. He covers how to choose a microcontroller, collecting necessary datasheets and information, setting up your hardware development environment and software IDE, and how to properly test and debug your code.

If you’re looking to make the jump from Arduino or another processor family but aren’t sure where to start, this should help get you off the ground. You can also cross-reference our tutorial on using AVR Studio 5 with Arduino projects if you want to mix and match environments.

Changes in the Arduino 1.0 release: How to migrate

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Splash screen for the Arduino 1.0 IDE.At long last, the Arduino team has released Arduino 1.0 – an update to the development environment and core libraries that make the Arduino hardware do its thang.  The 1.0 update has been in the works for a while, and covers a lot of changes, including some you’ll notice and some you won’t.  How does all this affect your Arduino projects?  Read on to find out.

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