The objective of this text is to help you to understand how Resistors work and use it in it’s most simple use, as a current limiter. If you want to know more about resistors and leds, check Here and Here.
Archive for the 'Hardware' Category
During the First Meeting of Electronic Arts in Florianópolis, we built a Breathalyzer using the Alcohol Gas Sensor MQ-3 and a Arduino Board to use in the last day of the meeting, in which we gave a party. You can see a quick video two posts below. Last days I received many emails asking for the code or how to make one, so I decided to build the sensor again, take pictures/videos and make a tutorial showing how you can make one, so here it is.
Continue reading ‘Building an Breathalyzer with MQ-3 and Arduino’
It happened last week, starting on Monday 11th January and finishing on Friday the 15th, the I Meeting of Electronic Arts, where people from many differet places of Brazil came to see what was going on. Our first idea was a meeting (de)constructive, build, hack, modify, learn, teach, freedom of knowledge. Several workshops were presented, Basic Electronics, Processing, PureData, and others (the videos of the presentations will be distributed when people finish editing).
On Tuesday night we made a walking trip crossing the dunes till we find Joaquina’s beach. After swiming in the cold waters, we walked back on a thick rain, amazing, it was long ago since the last time I walked on the rain wanting it!
We learned/teched a lot in this event, one thing that we’ve noticed is that creative minds work much better after midnight. There was no point planning anything for the morning because no one could wake up before 11h.
On Thursday night a party was organized, where we put in for a test some projects developed during the event, for example a Breathalyzer using a Alcohol Gas Sensor MQ-3 sensor, LEDs and an Arduino. By the way, never seen so many arduinos in one place, in different sizes and colors, beautiful!
You can check some pictures from my Flickr:
Here is also a Video from the Breathalyzer (I will make a post on how you can make one after the Campus Party next week)
Some more videos can be found on my Vimeo.
I recently got a Maxbotix LV-EZ4 Ultrasonic Range Finder to try understand how to use it with my little Arduino. Having a ultrasonic range finder can be very useful in many different projects, as it can detect objects, I can use it to make alarm systems (cars usually use this kind of sensor), Obstacle-Avoiding Robot and many other things that you may have in mind. It works better outdoors then the IR sensor, but the only thing I could notice is that it doen’t detects very well some thick carpets. Besides that, it’s a great sensor. From the datasheet we can read that it sonar range information from 6-inches out to 254-inches (15.24 cm – 6.452m).
In case you think a arduino board is too much for your ATmega Development, you should check this board made by yourITronics. Using the microcontroller`s internal clock, and programming using an ICSP cable you can start developing right now!
In the website you’ll find the scheme and the eagle file.
And Zach Smith says: “I’m really really really excited to announce this new product. This one was directly conceived, funded, and produced here by the RRRF as a direct result of the kind souls who have supported us so far. To get to the meat, the Sanguino is a new microcontroller board inspired by the Arduino. We took the biggest baddest 40-pin DIP that atmel makes and made a board with it. Its based on the atmega644P which provides 64K of flash, 4K of ram, and 32 GPIO pins. The best part: its compatible with the Arduino software, which means all of your code should run on it no problem, and you can program it just as easily.”
You can buy a kit from the RRRF for $25 or check out the Sanguino website.
I am totally going to get one!!!
Yesterday I was going to start watching a movie, when me and my friend pedro decided to give up on the movie and build a binary clock. After sometime thinking on how to program it, we made it. It works beautifully, so I decided to show here how I’ve done. It may not be the easiest way to make it work, but that’s what we’ve done.
I’ve owned a Iphone for a while now, it’s an amazing phone, the best I have ever used so far. But when I first started using it, my only concern was that the battery didn’t last as much as I expected. After two days, it was gone, and when I needed it, the phone just didn’t turn ON. I used to let the wireless on almost all the time and downloading many new apps. Now that I have some more experience on how my little gadget works, I will try to share some ideas on how you can optimize your iphone’s battery life and have a better iExperience.
Continue reading ‘How To Make Your Iphone Battery Last Longer’
Hello there! It’s been a while that I don’t post any electronic HowTo. Since I started electric engineering my life have been quite busy, studying a lot, but some days ago I have made a simple project in which I created a metronome using some simple parts you can find in any electronic shop. And I decided to share with everyone this blog. So if you are interested, so let’s start!