It's been a while since I posted on my blog, so I just wanted to send a shout that I'm still alive, but have just been very busy.  Between my new job position, two kids starting baseball season, a one-year-old and trying to keep up with the usual household "Mr. Fix-it" duties, I've had my hands full.  

When I started this website last winter I had great things planned, but spring has come and unfortunately the site & blog have taken the back burner.  So, hopefully I'll return soon for some more technical posts and to finish the posts that are currently in progress - 1) a comparison of Eagle vs KiCAD, and 2) some great embedded microcontroller resources for folks who are just getting their feet wet with mi.

I recently resumed my investigation into the capabilities of the Arduino platform and am pleased to find that the Arduino IDE does support the Atmel ATmega's timer interrupt capabilities.  In an earlier post I was uncertain whether or not, or how easily, a user could make use of these capabilites via the Arduino IDE.  The answer is basically here, and the author does a good job of spelling out the functionality that these capabilities offer and how to configure timer interrupts.  

I suspect the reason there is not as much readily available information on timer interrupt usage is because making use of timer interrupts is possibly the next skill level once an Arduino user has become fully familiar with the IDE and is able to write sketches that incorporate various libraries included in the IDE (i.e. servo, tone, SD card, etc.)  

Now, it would be nice if there were a library that supported this functionality...  Oh wait, what's this:
http://playground.arduino.cc/code/timer1

Next I plan to look into low-power support by way of various sleep modes available on the ATmega-series chips...

Over the next several weeks I hope to be rolling out a few open hardware designs along with a few blog posts on technical subjects. 

This one is a hardware design template for a shield for the Arduino UNO and compatible Arduino platforms. Skip the initial form factor design details and let yourself focus on what goes on the board.  Use this template to get a head start on your next Arduino shield design. 

You can grab the design files from my Google code repository.

Stay tuned for more like this...

Every year my son's class builds Valentine's Day treat boxes to put each others' Valentines Day treats into.  Last year in his kindergarten class, we made a simple box-shaped robot with a slot for the treats to go into.  This year we decided to up the anty a notch and go with something a little more entertaining.  

It started like this...  The Saturday morning before Valentine's Day, I was informed my son needed to build his Valentine's Day treat box before Valentine's Day, which is only 5 days away.  And with the way our family weekday schedule goes, that meant we only had Saturday and Sunday.  Not too big of a deal for a plain Jane treat box, but who wants plane Jane?  I started thinking, "what combination of LED's, motors, sound and, of course, a microcontroller would be cool, and yet be completed in one or two days?"  Then it just kinda hit me.  How 'bout a head that makes a sexy whistle, raises its eyebrows and has some flashing LED's for eyes...?  

I hadn't the foggiest idea at that point of what anything would look like or how to make the eyebrows move up and down given the supplies I had lying around and what could be accomplished in a day.  But I have a slew of microcontroller boards and was leaning towards the Arduino UNO as my first legitimate use of it.  So, I figured the rest would come to me by the time I got that far.  

I scrounged around in the basement, kitchen, and garage in search of something to use for its head...  Lucky for me, my wife does a lot of baking, which has contributed to the delinquincy of my fitness.  So, enter Hershey's cocoa tub...

Regarding the whole Arduino platform in general, I kind of have mixed feelings...  But before you go crazy on me, let me explain my opinions on the good and the bad and why.  

I don't remember when I first started hearing rumblings of the Arduino platform, but I as I recall it was at least two or three years ago.  At that time, I was pretty deep into an embedded software project on TI's MSP430 microcontroller.  I never paid much attention to the Arduino platform, nor really cared to research much about it until a few months ago.  If you are reading this blog, I am inclined to assume you have heard of, and regularly read blogs such as www.hackaday.com , as I do.  These blogs are often highlighting the use of the Arduino platform as an integral piece to sometimes strange and other times very clever home projects.  So, I finally decided to buy some hardware, download and install the IDE and see what the hype was all about.  As you might have read in a previous post, the first pieces of hardware I acquired was the Arduino UNO and the Arduino Mega 2560, as well as some accessories.  

It's been a while since my first blog post and I thought it was due time to make another entry.  When I decided to buy this domain, I actually had no intention of publishing a site......yet.  But part of the purchase deal was free website hosting, so I thought eh, what the heck.  I'll just start building and tinkering with my site, and just not publish it until I have a decent framework put together.  Not knowing much about the "proper way" to launch a website, I had no clue how most people kick off their website, and still don't.  


So, a couple days after the domain purchase, when everything was still pretty new to me, I noticed a status bar that showed xx% complete.  The key thing to make note of here is the number was less than 100%.  Being an engineer, this ate at me to some degree.  One of the things required to achieve 100% completeness included launching a blog.  And, as the story goes, if you give a mouse a cookie.....  And, well, here we are..... :)

So, I now have a blog, although I'm not a regular blogger.  I hope to use it as a way to help others by posting about my projects, maybe the occasional "thoughts of an engineer & hobbyist", etc.  

So I recently had my first experience with buying knockoff electronic development hardware from a sketchy source...  It's kind of like an online market with various sellers you can buy from.  I spent about 100 bucks and, all-in-all, it was a good experience, as I saved about 50% total from what these similar items would have cost otherwise.  However, I thought I'd write about the couple of items which were not so good....