MORE ABOUT Arduino

This is a submission from Distrelec about the next instalment of their webinar series. They have announced its collaboration with leading manufacturer of open-source technology, Arduino. The webinar 'rapid IoT system design with Arduino' will take place on Thursday 23rd May.

This circular wall clock comes as a partially assembled kit. It is presented in the form of a simple ring of about 25 cm (10 inches) diameter, to hang on the wall. In fact, all you see is this sober black crown a few centimetres in size, which acts as the dial. No display, no hands, no second hand, no pendulum, nothing like that. And yet, like all good timepieces, this one does have hands, a second hand, and even a pendulum.

Author Burkhard Kainka’s inspiring Foreword in the book I’m reviewing here has important clues as to why software defined radio (SDR) is a hit not only among existing radio amateurs. SDR has proven to be a great promotion tool for the declining radio hobby in general. Since the tuning and decoding of shortwave radio signals is now done with a minimum of hardware and powerful (free) software, it’s easy to see why newcomers to the radio hobby and others with “DC minds” or with “deep fears of RF” have been totally captured by the concept of SDR.

Occasionally it may be useful to visualize a continuous stream of data arriving through a serial connection as a web page in a browser. But how do you go about? May we suggest a bit of scripting?

This kit contains all the parts for four-legged robot with remote control. The robot is powered by twelve servos that are controlled by an Arduino Nano board. The remote control also contains a Nano board and a joystick for controlling the robot.

Values measured for a physical parameter called ‘the dew point’ indicate not only the risk of mould growth but also corrosion of steel objects including tools. Ventilating and heating afford some control over the dew point at a certain spot. However, to do this in a sensible way, the dew point has to be determined beforehand. That is exactly what this smart device is doing.

Distrelec Ltd, leading European distributor of electronics, automation and measurement technology has added the new Spresense range by Sony, manufacturer of consumer and professional electronics, to the webshop.

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!

You can use simple LED indicators to show the status of an application you are developing using an IoT board but you can convey so much more information when the dev board has the luxury of a built-in display. Check out this low-cost ESP32 development board with built-in OLED display available now from the Elektor Store.

Cthulhu is a fictional cosmic entity created somewhere around 1928 by writer H. P. Lovecraft. Being fictional and only described in words, its appearance is open to interpretation. Over the years several artists have had a go at it and came up with spectacular drawings, but none of them went as far as to give it the shape of an Arduino Mega add-on shield.