MORE ABOUT Arduino

If it happens to me, it probably happens to other people as well: once you think about it, it is too late. Xmas decoration is such a thing; you just can't start early enough with planning your Xmas decoration, especially when it involves complex lighting schemes requiring hours of programming time. Not this year however with a project that's sure to give you a head start.

For the 3-Way Display Alarm Clock published in Elektor 5/2018, [ref. 1], the desire was expressed for the ability to set more than one alarm. Who, after all, wants to be awakened early on your day off, when you could sleep in? So we 'just' had to add a few extra alarms to the software. Anyone who has developed software knows that such assumptions — especially with existing code — do not necessarily turn into simple reality. “Someone has already made a start on that. It looks like it is nearly done and shouldn't be much more work”. Sure...

This new Elektor book describes how an Android mobile device can communicate with a variety of hardware platforms — including Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and the ESP32 processor — over a Wi-Fi link or by using SMS text messages. All the Android projects in this book were developed using the B4A programming language.

Starting this week, the new Arduino MKR VIDOR 4000 board is available in the Elektor Store. With an Intel 10CL016 FPGA. That’s 16 000 logic elements plus some specialised signal processing embedded multipliers (read: audio and video). The board, at 83 x 25 mm (3.3 x 1 inches) is as full as an egg. In addition to standard GPIOs, there are HDMI, USB, JST and MIPI (Camera) connectors. And let’s not forget the ARM ATSAMD21 32-bit microcontroller!

A good tool makes work easier by removing tasks more or less unrelated to what you are trying to achieve; it should let you focus on your target, not on getting things to work. The Rohm SensorShield was developed with this thought in mind. Designed as an add-on board for the popular Arduino platform it offers a plug-and-play solution for comfortable sensor evaluation.

MobiLimb is an component that can change shape and can be attached to portable devices. It is a small serial robotic manipulator (with five degrees of freedom), which is easily added to (and just as easily removed from) existing devices (smartphone, tablet).

First launched in 2005, the Arduino platform is responsible for making embedded microcontroller development accessible to all. With its simple to use yet comprehensive approach, Arduino has eased the often difficult task of interfacing an embedded application to the real world of hardware devices. 

The Elektor Uno R4 is like an Arduino Uno but featuring two UARTs, two I²C (IIC or TWI) ports, two SPI ports, 24 GPIOs, eight analogue inputs, nine timers, and more. Based on the B-type of the ATmega328 microcontroller popularised by the Arduino Uno, the Elektor Uno R4 is the 100%-compatible successor to the Uno that the Arduino team failed to design. So we did it for you. Sign up for one (or more) Uno R4's at GroupGets.

A PWM signal requires just a single digital output on an IC and so it is hardly surprising that these days the digital I/O pins of microcontrollers often come with extensive PWM capabilities. However, there are also downsides: for example, DACs are faster and more accurate. But now an IC is available that offers a simple upgrade to a PWM-based design.

Edition 3/2018 of Elektor Magazine has this project which scrolls text on a pretty row of eight 8 × 8 LED matrix displays. Its ESP-12F Wi-Fi module (based on the ESP8266) is easily programmed with the Arduino IDE. So, from your mobile phone or any other Wi-Fi device, it suffices to send the text to display and the speed and brightness controls to an ESP8266 webserver.