One tiny megaphone
You often hear that to work with graphic displays on the Arduino platform you need to use a Mega or other high-performance board. I got curious about how much you can actually get done on an a measly Uno and similar boards based on the classic ATmega328P. You can find the ongoing results on my wiki.
The story so far: 128×64 and smaller monochrome displays are usable. The smallest TFT displays much less so.
There’s a growing series of good videos covering ESP8266 Tips & Tricks on ACROBOTIC’s YouTube channel. The ESP8266 has become quite a darling in the IoT world, and a seriously cool community is growing around it.
NodeMCU devkit picture by Vowstar (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
I am cautiously optimistic about the recently announced resolution of conflict between Arduino LLC and Arduino Srl. Back when the issue flared up, I took sides based on the information I had available, but I then decided to refrain from public comment as additional information on the issue did not seem to be forthcoming.
While I am hoping this announcement means a lovebath for everyone, I am concerned about some of the wording used in the announcement, specifically that, “The newly created ‘Arduino Holding’ will become the single point of contact for the wholesale distribution of all current and future products, and will continue to bring tremendous innovations to the market.” Does this mean that Arduino will shift its focus toward for-profit and more closed designs? In other words, will the hardware arm of the project maintain the project’s fully open culture? There have been signs that things have been closing up on the software side as well since Arduino LLC seem to be be in no hurry to answer questions regarding whether the code for their new SaaS IDE will be open sourced or not.
So, cautiously optimistic I am.
Since I had to install Arduino support in a new Netbeans installation, I decided it was a good time to document what’s needed. Check it on the wiki.
About a week ago, I posted on G+ my concerns regarding the impact that Microchip’s purchase of Atmel might have for the Arduino ecosystem. Turns out I’m not alone, judging from the comments in the post from the Arduino folks that followed the same day.
Communities build incredible product loyalty, and open source (in addition to its other benefits) is an incredibly easy way to build community. Here’s hoping that Microchip realizes this and leaves a good formula alone.
The Arduino team have just released a new 32-bit board that targets IoT. Read about it here.
So there I was scratching an itch when I realized the scratch would make for a good Arduino library. AsyncTimer lets you create a timer that does something when you start it (or nothing if you prefer), then waits a predetermined time before doing something else. While it’s waiting, it doesn’t lock up your Arudino the way the delay() function does—it just schedules the time-out action to take place some time in the future.
If you’re not the RTFM type, you can just get what you need from the GitHub repository.
If you’ve opted to use a general-purpose IDE for Arduino development, perhaps in conjunction with a Makefile, it’s helpful to know what directories to point your IDE toward to get decent code completion.
To that end, I’ve added a list of the ones I know about to my wiki.
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.
Congratulating the core and the community for 10 years of creativity-enabling open source wonderfulness.