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.
Continue reading “Nokia 5110 Screen – Photo to Bitmap Converter”
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.
Continue reading “Burn bootload to Arduino Mego without ISCP pins”
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.
I previously covered a method of programming the ATtiny85 using an Arduino Duemilanove. However, my Duemilanove board isn’t working at the moment and I need to work on a project so I decided to program it with an Atmel AVRISP mkII programmer. Here are the simple steps, mostly so that I don’t have to lookup the pinouts online next time I need to do this. Continue reading “Programming an ATtiny85 with the AVRISP mkII”
I’ve recently gotten into SMD soldering and have been thrilled at how much easier it is than I imagined. However, there are some parts that are very difficult to solder because the solder pads are under the part. The obvious answer is reflow soldering, but I have no experience with it and it can be expensive and difficult to do. So this is my experiment in finding a cheap and easy way to do reflow soldering. Continue reading “Easy and Cheap Reflow Soldering Without Solder Paste”
With so many frequent flyer programs, it can be difficult to chose the best one for you. Making the right choice is important since it can be difficult to switch programs once you’ve have status and a bunch of miles. This post will hopefully help you chose the right program for you. Unfortunately, I’m only going to be looking at US carriers so all you international folks are out of luck on this one. I also won’t be covering US Airways as they are currently merging with AA. Continue reading “How to Choose a Frequent Flyer Program”
My master’s thesis is a hexakopter that captures weather data. It stores this data locally but also sends it back to a base station on the ground using a series one Xbee Pro 900MHz. I finally received my pair of Xbees last week (don’t you love slow purchasing departments?) and wanted to test the range of the wireless link. Continue reading “Testing the range of the Xbee Pro 900”
One of the many projects I’m working on requires rotary encoders communicating with a drawing program running on a computer. As always, I’d prefer to do this as cheaply as possible and since I’m working with the ATtiny a lot lately, I thought I’d try it on that. Continue reading “Rotary Encoder with the ATtiny85”
One of the first things I wanted to work on after figuring out how to program the ATtiny85 was to get serial communication working. Turns out this is incredibly simple. You just have to use the standard software serial library and define the rx and tx pins. Continue reading “Software Serial on the ATtiny85”
Despite what the students in my Introductory Programming class seem to think, good coding style is actually really important. Not only does it make it easier for others to work on and debug your code, but it also makes it easier for you to work on it. For me, the most important thing is indention. Proper indention lets you line up brackets and easily see what loop or if statement you’re working in. This gets even more important when the brackets span more than a single page. Continue reading “Changing the Arduino IDE Indentions”
The Wandering Engineer 