MORE ABOUT Arduino

Creating a new sketch in the Arduino IDE makes the editor open a template containing skeletons for the functions setup and loop. What if you don't like this template? Can you edit it somehow? Yes, you can, and here is how.

This Arduino project, described in the November & December 2017 issue of Elektor is both useful and original in many respects. It is notable for the use of a component a bit out of the ordinary: a load cell. For electronics purposes, this is a simple variable resistance which measures the mechanical deformation to which it is subjected.

When you have to use the Arduino IDE on a public or university computer on which you are not allowed to install anything, you may not be allowed to install any board packages or libraries. Making the Arduino IDE portable solves this problem.

This glowing new bargraph thermometer from Elektor Labs is based on an Arduino Nano. It offers a beautiful graphical representation of ambient temperature using a Russian IN-9 tube and an illuminated scale with various RGB-controlled colours. The temperature scale in degrees Celsius as well as Fahrenheit extends from 10 °C to 30 °C / 50 °F to 85 °F. The circuit consists of a 5-to-150 V "voltage doubler" step-up converter, an IN-9 tube driver based on a low-voltage rail-to-rail opamp, two RGB LEDs and of course the Nano.

Take two DVD players, use one as a plotting platform moving forward and backward, and mount the other vertically on it to provide left and right displacements. Add a simple RC servo to it to move the tool up and down and away you go.

Suppose you want to measure a slowly-varying voltage from a sensor, or perhaps plot the discharge curve of a battery. Is it really necessary to sit there and note down a reading from the multimeter every so many seconds or minutes? It is less tedious and much more elegant to use this Arduino-based unit connected to your oscilloscope. Two questions motivated Kurt Schuster at the beginning of this project: ‘is my battery any good?’ and ‘is this charger charging my battery correctly?’

This video shows how to establish a peer-to-peer wireless LoRa communication. With a simple example based on Arduino, it explains how to update the data from a DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor to the ThingSpeak cloud. Before being able to send data from sensors to a cloud server, a beginning developer may need targeted assistance to quickly learn LoRa and IoT technology. That's why Elektor has chosen the new Dragino LoRa IoT Development Kit. Soon you too will turn your ideas into practical applications on the Internet of your own Things.

To make accurate voltages measurements you need an A/D converter (ADC) chip which has good resolution. The folks at Elektor Labs have developed a board containing a four-channel 16-bit ADC. It’s no coincidence the board uses a Gnublin/EEC connector which makes it compatible with the Elektor’s Linux board, Xmega Webserver and the new Extension shield for Arduino. A universal C library is included to make integration a walk in the park.

Do you intend to work on a Raspberry Pi project with a camera? Then this book will get you going for sure. In this book about camera projects, Dogan Ibrahim shows you how you can do this step-by-step . From a simple photo with a selfie stick, or the construction of a wildlife camera, right up to the complex process of licence plate recognition.

The word LiDAR, the ‘Li’ meaning ‘light’ indicates a device for optoelectronic echolocation. Instead of radio frequencies, the Lidar transmits a pulsed laser beam, the echo of which allows the determination of the distance of a reflecting obstacle. There is much talk these days of self-driving cars. Cheap Lidars with interesting characteristics are now available to anyone; they permit rapid development beyond the experimental stage.