Pre-flight check...Is your Arduino and computer ready?

Sketches, variables, procedures and hacking code

The serial library and binary data - getting chatty with Arduino and crunching numbers

Here is a collection of hacks, tricks, ideas for Arduino boards To be amended as I think of them...

Libraries are great places, and not yet illegal in the United States! If you ever need to learn how to do something, like say fix a motorcycle, you can go to your local library and take out a book. Sure you could buy the book but the library is nice because as a resource you can get the book whenever you need it, keeping your house uncluttered.

More Arduino Hacks.

The most fun you can have (after blinking LEDs) is using sensors to detect whats going on in the world and act on that information. However, all sensors have their own methods of interfacing. That can make them a real pain to work with: some need pull-up resistors, some need certain power supplies, some use lots of power, some don't. Since there aren't that many different sensors that people tend to want to use I have collected the most common sensors with code examples and wiring diagrams.

Tutorials include: Force sensitive resistor - Used to detect physical pressure such as pinching, squeezing, pushing, brushing. Photocells - Used to detect light/dark, breakbeams, simple object detection. Temperature - Used to determine environmental temperature. Tilt sensors - Used to detect motion/vibration and orientation.

Used to detect light/dark, breakbeams, simple object detection

Used to detect motion/vibration and orientation.

The MaxSonar EZ1 provides very short to long-range detection and ranging, in an incredibly small package. It can detect objects from 0-inches to 254-inches (6.45-meters) and provides sonar range information from 6-inches out to 254-inches with 1-inch resolution.

IR detectors are little microchips with a photocell that are tuned to listen to infrared light. They are almost always used for remote control detection - every TV and DVD player has one of these in the front to listen for the IR signal from the clicker.

What is a microcontroller?

Step-by-step how to install AVR dev tools

Choosing a Programmer

The most important debugging tool in any E.E.'s toolbox is a trusty multimeter. A multimeter can measure continuity, resistance, voltage and sometimes even current, capacitance, temperature, etc. It's a swiss army knife for geeks!

How to measure resistance - resistors, potentiometers and sensors

Soldering is really easy, if you can write then you can easily solder. Here are a bunch of recommended tutorials on how to solder!

A few tutorials dealing with LCDs (Liquid Crystal Displays) and how to wire them up for use with a microcontroller.

This tutorial will show you how to solder together a shield for an LCD with a 8x2 header

After attending a conference where the $1 million "sea-sick flashlight" (named "THE DAZZLER") was demonstrated by the US Dept. of Homeland Security, we decided to create our own version. For under $250, you can build your own dazzler and we've released the source code, schematics and PCB files to make it easy. A great Arduino project for people who really like blinking LEDs. We also added in a mode selection so you can put it into some pretty color-swirl modes, great for raves and parties!

This shield supports any of four popular GPS modules and stores data on a standard DOS-formatted SD flash memory card. Simply plug it into your computer when you've finished your data capture and the plain text files are ready for importing into Google Earth, GPSvisualizer, or a spreadsheet.

Arduino is a great starting point for electronics, and with a motor shield it can also be a nice tidy platform for robotics and mechatronics. Here is a design for a full-featured motor shield that will be able to power many simple to medium-complexity projects.

Here's a handy Arduino shield: we've had a lot of people looking for a dedicated and well-designed data logging shield. We worked hard to engineer an inexpensive but well-rounded design. Not only is it easy to assemble and customize, it also comes with great documentation and libraries.

If you've ever struggled to use a solderless breadboard with an Arduino, you understand how frustrating it can be! I designed this Arduino clone to solve this problem in an inexpensive DIY fashion. Kits with all parts are available in the Adafruit webshop

The CHB is a cool single board Linux computer that has much of the same hardware as the famous Chumby One . It's great for people who are experienced with Linux and want to have the power of a microcomputer with audio and video output while at the same time getting all the peripherals of a microcontroller such as analog-to-digital conversion, PWM outputs, sensors, bit twiddling, and broken-out GPIOs!

The chumby has a four-pin, 3v level TTL serial connection port running at 115.2 Kbps. You cannot just connect this to your computer's serial port, parallel port or USB port without a converter. We think the best way to connect is using an FTDI cable which can be easily modified.

Sean Cross wrote a great i2c twiddler-tool. This allows you to poke and peek at i2c chips right from the command line. Nice!

The Chumby hacker board does not have Ethernet capability built in, but its very easy to add! We have found that ASIX AX88772 chipset modules work. Note that many dongles probably won't work - if you have one kicking around you can try it but don't be surprised when it is not recognized!

The easiest way to do things for now is to use a linux machine or a bootable linux CD/DVD, or even a virtual machine running under Windows. Macintosh has most of these commands available too in a root window. Some things can be done on the Chumby hackerboard itself since dd (and fdisk) might be available.

When I first saw the Drawdio at Maker Faire I knew it would be a great project for beginners: A lot of fun with instant gratification! Essentially, its a very simple musical synthesizer that uses the conductive properties of pencil graphite to create different sounds. The result is a fun toy that lets you draw musical instruments on any piece of paper.

Working on my thesis...when I really just wanted to play some Arkanoid. Unfortunately, my original NES was busted a long time ago (blinky), and furthermore I didnt even have a TV. Lucky for me I had a couple things kicking around my workbench that did the trick. This is a design for a very simple, very inexpensive portable Nintendo gaming system with built in games. Theres no provision for cartridges, but its comfy to play.

This is our first clock kit design, made with a retro Russian display tube!

• Cool glowing blue tube with 8 digits and alarm on/off dot
• Adjustable brightness
• Alarm with volume adjust
• Precision watch crystal keeps time with under 20ppm (0.0002%) error (< 2 seconds a day)
• Clear plastic enclosure protects clock from you and you from clock
• Battery backup will let the clock keep the time for up to 2 weeks without power
• Selectable 12h or 24h display
• Displays day and date
• 10 minute snooze
• Integrated boost converter so it can run off of standard DC wall adapters, works in any country regardless of mains power
• Great for desk or night table use, the clock measures 4.9" x 2.9" x 1.3" (12.5cm x 7.4cm x 3.3cm)
• Completely open source hardware and software, ready to be hacked and modded!

This project is a second revision of the MiniPOV. This version changes from the PIC 16F630 chip to the Atmel ATtiny2313, which is a little more expensive but has many improved features. For one, by properly wiring it to a parallel port, one does not need a special "microcontroller programmer". Secondly, a free C compiler (avr-gcc) is available, which makes writing and reading code much much easier.

The Minty MP3 player can be built from parts that are sold at Ye Olde Traditional electronics distributor (digikey/mouser/newark). Half of the parts can be sampled for free, for a minimal total cost of $25 for parts, and $25 for a PCB. And the case is soooo Minty!*

* Do not eat MintyMP3

This is a quicky tutorial, showing how you can quickly modify a 5 or 6V solar panel to charge up a lithium polymer (lipo) battery. The battery can then be used to power any electronics project - you can even charge at the same time

This project details how to build a Smart/SIM card reader/writer for experimentation and investigation of SIM & Smart cards.Once the reader design is built, the open source software can be used to read from and write to the card. Together they can be used to backup/restore stored SIM card data, recover deleted SMS's and phone contacts, examine the last phone numbers dialed, etc.

Tired of all those LCD TVs everywhere?
Want a break from advertisements while you're trying to eat?
Want to zap screens from across the street?

The new Universal TV-B-Gone kit is what you need! This ultra-high-power version of the popular TV-B-Gone is fun to make and even more fun to use.

Build a custom USB gamepad that has an accelerometer mouse inside!

This website details the design and construction Wave Bubble: a self-tuning, wide-bandwidth portable RF jammer. The device is lightweight and small for easy camouflaging: it is the size of a pack of cigarettes.

Good for hooking up Processing/PureData/Max to a MIDI device.

If you have an Arduino project where the dev board is stuck inside a machine, or attached to the rafters or is inaccessable in some other way, a wireless programming/debugging link will save you tons of time. This tutorial is an extension on Rob's version. In this tutorial, no extra firmware or hardware (other than a capacitor) is necessary. Just use the default bootloader. I use a 'classic' Arduino but of course this can be easily adapted to any version or clone.

The YBox2 is a DIY networked set-top box. Connect it to your TV and you can design customized content to be delivered direct from the Internet.

This project is great for people who want a new platform to experiment with. The video and Internet cores are ready to go and easy to work with. We have some example widgets that demonstrate the YBox2's capability, and the whole project is open source so you can start hacking your own. If you've ever been curious about the Parallax Propeller chip, the YBox2 is a perky little platform with tons of accessories.

This is a quickie project showing how you can upgrade a vintage bike lamp for a '60s or '70s roadster into a powerful 1W LED light. Its much more efficient and a lot brighter!

Biking in the winter, or at night, is dangerous without a front light. A good front-light is essential, not only for being seen, but to see the road. LED lamps will not illuminate the road, and they can be too dim for cars to see you (1W or better LEDs are quite nice as headlamps.) I offer here a simple (but high-quality) design to build your own 5 or 10W halogen lamp, which runs off of a rechargeable 7.2V or 7.4V Lithium Ion battery pack.

Everything you ever wanted to know about batteries!

This is a basis for how one may go about setting up an electronics workbench in a company or well-equipped home shop. Tools are divided up by type and are categorized by importance and possibly even quality.

Thanks to the ease of going into business, and the increasing demand for DIY kits, this is a great time for people to get involved in kit making. I'm starting to collect resources for kit-makers, including a list of existing kitmakers as well as hints and tricks I've learned from running Adafruit Industries

Tips for selling kits

This is the most important equipment necessary!

Laser cutters are very expensive piece of equipment - chances are you spent over $5,000 on yours (we spent $15k!) which means its important to keep the machine in good condition. There is nothing worse than having a multi-thousand dollar machine destroyed because of a few minutes' negligence.

Materials for Laser Cutters

Places that current offer laser services

An Introduction to open source hardware.

Many people (including myself) have not waited around for a specialized license to go around making open hardware. Common 'subtitutions' are GPL, Creative Commons, MIT, BSD and similar open licenses. While these licenses are often pretty good at stuff like firmware, or CAD drawings, they don't take into account some of the differences with hardware, particularly patents and derivative works.

For all the little things that took you 2 weeks to figure out

Although some people still use rub-off transfers and sharpie markers to make layouts, there is software that will do schematic capture, and pcb layout. Not only will you get straight lines, but also revision control and ERC and DRC (electrical/design rule checks)! Some software can even hook straight into a SPICE circuit simulator.

Tutorials for software and such

Javascript cost calculator

This will, hopefully, reduce your chances of getting whacked by a car while biking. Super cheap!

An bed made from iron pipe. The design is simple yet sturdy. Not too pricy, simple to make, easy to adjust/disassemble, this bed will give your room an industrial feel.

Jellybeans are the cheap and ultra-common parts that one uses for electronics. Like 10k resistors, indicator LEDs, or 0.1uF caps

hells yes its my very own mixtape of package footprints. Dont forget you can also grab parts out of any adafruit project's .brd file by running extract-pkg.ulp (or whatever its called). However, since its nice to be tidy, I'll be merging everything into ONE FILE called the Ye Olde Adafruit Eagle Librarie, available at github

We often get the question "How do you program all the chips in your kits?" Well! Now we have a nice tutorial showing how its done!

This is actually not any sort of product or public project (!) - its something I designed to help me evaluate solar panels and how they act when charging batteries. Normally this requires a lot of multimeters and its a bit of a pain to do if you have to constantly change out panels. So I decided I would build a specialized tool that would assist me. Here is what I wanted!

A power supply is a device that supplies power to another device, at a specific voltage level, voltage type and current level.

This tutorial is for the Mitutoyo digital calipers we carry in the Adafruit shop.

We love some good LED blinking as much as the next person but after years of LED-soldering we need something cooler to get us excited. Sure there are RGB LEDs and those are fun too but what comes after that? Well, we have the answer: Digital LED Strips!

Add some jazz & pizazz to your project with a color touchscreen LCD. This TFT display is big (2.8" diagonal) bright (4 white-LED backlight) and colorful (16-bit 262,000 different shades)! 240x320 pixels with individual pixel control, this has way more resolution than a black and white 128x64 display. As a bonus, this display has a resistive touchscreen attached to it already, so you can detect finger presses anywhere on the screen.

This tutorial will cover digital shipping scales! I know, exciting, right? But really, if you need to sense weights and get them into a computer or microcontroller, these are really easy to find, fairly accurate and easy to use.