Latex Tips and Tricks for Writing a Thesis or Dissertation

The best tip I can give for thesis writing is to use Latex.  For large documents it will be far easier to use and look much better in the end.  However, there is a bit of a learning curve with Latex and it does so much that it can sometimes be difficult to even know all the cool things it can do.  This posts will cover some of the Latex tips and tricks I’ve learned while writing my thesis over the past month year way too long.  I’m not going to include all the stuff you usually see like how to include a figure or how to make things bold.  I assume that you know how to use google and there are thousands of pages of tutorials for those common items.  I’m just going to be discussing the lesser known tips that I found helpful for long documents like a thesis or dissertation.

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Arduino i2c problem sending multiple bytes

I ran into a bit of a weird problem a little while back when using I2C on Arduinos.  I friend also had the problem recently so I figured maybe it was common enough that this post could help other people.  The problem occurs when you have the master request a certain number of bytes from the slave.  Except when the slave sends the bytes back, they all show up as -1 except for the last one.  Here is some example code and a workaround solution.

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Rotary Encoder on the ATtiny85 – Part 2

One of the most popular posts on my blog is this post about using rotary encoders on the attiny85.  Unfortunately that post is mostly things I tried that didn’t work.  A few months after writing that post I realized why it didn’t work and posted about that.  And finally, I’ve figured out the solution, which you can see below. Continue reading “Rotary Encoder on the ATtiny85 – Part 2”

Pin Change Interrupts on ATtiny85

Pin Change interrupts on the Arduino have eluded me for awhile so when I finally figured them out last week, I also started messing with Pin Change Interrupts on the ATtiny.  Unlike with the ATmega chips, examples are much harder to find for the ATtiny interrupts and even when you find them, I don’t think the quality is quite as good.  So here is a simple guide to working with Pin Change Interrupts on the ATtiny85. Continue reading “Pin Change Interrupts on ATtiny85”

Arduino Pin Change Interrupts

I recently needed to do some work with Pin Change Interrupts and it was a bit of a learning experience for me.  As it turns out, they’re actually pretty easy.  I’m posting this so that when I need to look it up in the future, I can easily find it and maybe I can help somebody else out too. Continue reading “Arduino Pin Change Interrupts”

AVR (& Arduino) Default ISR – Resetting Pin Change Interrupt Problem

I just got done wasting 10 very frustrating hours on a Interrupt Service Routine problem.  In this case it was a pin change interrupt that causes the chip/board to reset.  It turned out to be a simple capitalization error but luckily I also discovered some info about the AVR default ISR.  I wanted to post it here in case somebody accidentally found it useful.   Continue reading “AVR (& Arduino) Default ISR – Resetting Pin Change Interrupt Problem”

Nokia 5110 Screen – Photo to Bitmap Converter

The Nokia 5110 LCD screen is a nice little LCD sold by both Sparkfun and Adafruit.  I needed to work with one for my wireless weather station and wanted to use my logo instead of the Adafruit logo which comes in their library.  So I wrote a processing program to make creating images easier.

Nokia5110Screen Shot 2014-07-12 at 2.06.08 AM

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Burn bootload to Arduino Mego without ISCP pins

This tutorial is pretty simple but it is worth a mention in case others with less experience get into a similar jam.  I was having trouble uploading some programs to my Arduino Mega so I decided to burn the bootloader again to see if that fixed the problem.  Unfortunately, I had chopped the ICSP headers off about a year ago when I didn’t really understand what they were used for and didn’t want them touching a shield I was putting on top.  Fortunately, there is a way around this.
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Current Capacity of Wires and Traces

I’ve been looking at the maximum current ratings of both wires and traces and have had a hard time finding good numbers.  So this is a collection of what I’ve found but limited to the ranges that I normally use.  There are lots of very advanced calculators online but I had difficulty finding a nice clear chart.  So I hope this helps others or at least helps me next time I need to look it up. Continue reading “Current Capacity of Wires and Traces”

ATtiny i2c Slave

I’m working on a project where I need several sensors that communicate back to a central processor.  Since I’ll have several of these sensors I need them to be cheap and the ATtiny85 jumped to mind.  The only problem is that I’ve never used i2c with the ATtiny series before.  I read dozens of “tutorials” about it from around the web and couldn’t find a nice simple example.  This is my solution.

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