The new number one

101

The folks at Arduino.cc are set to release what appears to be the Arduino Uno usurper. The Arduino/Genuino 101, in addition to being heaps faster, also has built-in Bluetooth LE and a 6-axis accelerometer. Co-developed with Intel, the board uses their Intel® Curie™ Compute Module. While not yet released, scuttlebutt says it’ll cost about the same as the Uno.

Minimal Arduino using through-hole parts

brdfront brdback

It’s still hovering around freezing, so I guess it’s time for another Arduino.

I got curious about how small I could make yesterday’s Arduino Pro Mini using through hole parts if I got rid of everything optional. And here’s the answer.

I got the board down to the width of the original Arduino Pro Mini: 0.6″. I wasn’t able to shrink the length any; it’s still 1.8″. It doesn’t have an on-board power supply, there are no LEDs, and no optional pullups for I2C/Wire. Totally minimal, baby. You can see for yourself in the schematic.*

As with yesterday’s offering, a PCB is available through OSH Park.

*Subject to change!

Arduino Pro Mini using through-hole parts

Arduino_Pro_Mini_PTH

Because winters are sucky and the weather outside still not at all inviting, I decided yesterday to see how close you could get to making an Arduino Pro Mini with  through-hole parts. The answer is about this close.

The main differences are the final product measures 1.1″ x 1.8″ rather than 0.7″ x 1.3″, two extra analog inputs available on the SMD version of the ATMEGA328P are missing, and the low-power configuration is a build-time option. Here’s the schematic* as it stands today.

If you’re feeling brave enough to build this thing, PCBs are available through OSH Park.

*Subject to change!

Open source audio remote control

audio-remote

I’ve started a FLOSS remote control receiver project for DIY audio preamplifiers. I think it’s just about good enough to make public.

Remote control is one of the more challenging things for an audio DIY person to implement, so I thought having an open source hardware and software platform for doing this would be useful. It uses our good friend Arduino for brains and works with the Philips RC-5 protocol. I like RC-5 because its the closest thing I know of to a universal, well-documented, brand- and model-agnostic protocol.

The IR command decoding is done using Guy Carpenter’s excellent RC5 library. I also considered using Ken Shirriff’s multi-protocol IR library. Ken’s library works with a large number of protocols, but I thought its larger memory footprint might preclude porting this thing to tiny AVRs.

Details on the project are available in my RC5-Preamp GitHub or GitLab repository. [2021 update: This project is currently abandonware, so I have made the above repos private. If anyone wants access, contact me and we’ll figure something out.]