Preference Setting in Arduino IDE 1.6.0

It is very kind that this new IDE (1.6.0) detects my system language and uses it as editing and interface language. It is more comfortable for me to use English since the most resource I am using for Arduino is in English. This new IDE has the option to change the possibility to customize the interface.

Arduino ATtiny Project

This project is running again. I'm glad to see their recent update. Very useful! Recommended!

see http://highlowtech.org/

USE TLC5940 on Arduino Leonardo

The TLC5490 library (http://playground.arduino.cc/learning/TLC5940 ) should be modified to be working with Arduino Leonardo. The Solution can be found here:
http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=110394.0
I went through all the process and this solution works fine. This post is my documentation.

Upgrade Arduino WiFi-Shield firmware

I am newly studying the interaction between arduino and xively.com. The interaction was first designed for arduino ethernet but now I need the sketch run with WiFi. I use the WiFi shield and Arduino MEGA 2560. Although the internet seems work, my arduino just cannot get the xively data from internet. Even the example sketch of "wifi web client" doesn't work properly.

Finally I tried to update the firmware on my wifi shield. The introduction from the official arduino page is correct but lacks clear step-by-step explaination. Some other online solutions don't work on my shield. This article is written after my finally finshing the update and solving some problems. The final process I found out is actually relative simple and requires only a few downloads (I use windows):

Arduino ATtiny 84/85 (updated 2020/8/4)

ATtiny allows you to reduce the cost of your electronic prototype, even lower than Arduino Mini series. ATtiny84 or 85 is microcontroller from Atmel. ATtiny85 offers 6 I/O pins for communication and 8192 byte memory, and ATtiny 84 12 I/O pins and 8192 byte. You can use Arduino IDE to make a sketch and upload onto this tiny IC. To do that, you need to set up your Arduino as an ISP (In-System Programming).

I think, the original developers using ATtiny for Arduino projects are from High-Low Tech Lab of MIT (2009-2014). Visit their page for more information: http://highlowtech.org/ 

This post shows you how to use ATtiny84/85 for your project and other recent updates. 

ATtiny85

How to get start with arduino

Although there is a tutorial on the arduino website, it still seems difficult for the beginers to learn arduino program. I think the problem is that the examples are categorized after special themes, and the difficulties in each theme are quite different. Here I would like to offer a list of examples for the arduino beginers who tries to learn this program by their own. You may do the toturial examples according to my list one after one so that they can learn this program and codes more easily.

The first, get a arduino board Uno and downlad arduino sofware,

and install the board on the computer under this introduction,

Now comes the list. When you start an example, you should try to understand every single code. You may not be able to understand them all, and that's why you need to look the unfamiliar codes up in it's reference parallelly. I believe, if you can finish the first 10 examples, you will get a global understanding about how to program the arduino board. For the beginers who use arduino for building prototype will need to finish the first 15 examples. Example 16~19 are for sound functions of arduino. If you don't need sound functions, you can just skip them. If you can understand the all 22 examples, I believe you will have the ability to study other tutorial examples or you can start learning arduino by studying each language coad in the Reference freely.

List:
01. BareMinimum
02. Blink
03. DigitalReadSerial
04. Button (The circuit picture in this example lacks an LED. You should connect an LED to Arduino board the same like the 02.Blink example.)
05. If Statement
05-2. You should now study "Comparison Operators" in the Reference.
06. For Loop
07. Knock
08. Analog Input
09. Analog Read Serial
10. Analog InOut Serial
11. Fading
12. Smoothing
13. Knob
14. Sweb
15. Motorknob
16. Tone
17. Pitch Follower
18. Simple Keyboard
19. Tone 4
20. While Loop
21. Switch Case
22. Switch Case 2
22-2. You should now study "Boolean Operators" in the Reference.

How to count time in Arduino

There are two simple ways to do pretty exact time counting in Arduino. The first one is to use delay(). Everytime it runs a delay(1), it's 1 millisecond passed. (1millisecond =0.001second, which means to delay 1 second you need to run delay(1000). ) Like this, you can count the runnning time by counting the delayed milliseconds.

But you may have many defferent delay() in your loop codes and you don't know how many milliseconds have been delayed anymore because it runs everytime differently. In this case you will need to use millis(). It's an internal clock in Arduino which starts to count time everytime the Arduino board starts running or is reseted. It can be counted to 50 days. To give the data of millis() to a variable you have to define this variable as unsigned long.

Code Example

unsigned long Val;
void setup(){
  Serial.begin(9600);
}
void loop(){
  Val = millis();
  Serial.print("Count = "); Serial.println(Val);
  delay(1000);
}

Reference:
http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/Millis

How to use AREF of Arduino

The aref works like this...

When you do analogue to digital conversion the arduino board uses the 5V supply as a reference. this means that any voltage between 0 and 5v is represented as numbers between 0 and 1024. If the signal you are measuring never reaches 5V it is possible to change  the reference  to an internal 2.5 v source and this divides the space between 0 and 2.5v in 1024 steps effectively doubling the resolution. If this still doesn't work for you then you can ask the processor to use an external voltage applied to aref. if you find a super stable 1V refernce source this will give you 1milli volt resolution for the ADC. this is used only in special applications because at that resolution the noise becomes a big issue etc etc

switching reference voltage requires adding a few lines of C code to your arduino code.

===========
cbi(ADMUX, REFS1); //clear REFS1 bit (0)
cbi(ADMUX, REFS0); //clear REFS0 bit (0)
===========

Reference:
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1139161553/3#3

http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1142283743

Sketch Uploading problem by Arduino Pro Mini 328P5V

When uploading our codes to Arduino Mini, we need an adaptor - Arduino MiniUSB - to accomplish it, in which we coonect the 4 Pins of both boards - the Gnd, +5V, RX, TX. But if you got problem to upload the codes to Arduino Pro Mini, please try this: connect one more Pin - the RTS of Arduino MiniUSB to RST of Arduino Pro Mini. It should work now.

Of course, you should choose the correct board typ in your arduino program.

Pins on theArduino MiniUSB

Arduino Pro Mini 328P5V

How to memory arduino data when power drops

Use EEPROM on Arduino
Be Careful!! The number of time to write EEPROM on Arduino is limited. Arduino supports usually at least 100,000 times EEPROM writing.
http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/EEPROM
http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/EEPROMWrite
http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/EEPROMRead

or on a EEPROM chip, for example a 16 kBit EEPROM chip by conrad.de
http://www.conrad.de/ce/de/product/150180/EEPROM-24LC16BP-MICROCHIP/SHOP_AREA_17311&promotionareaSearchDetail=005