One of the first things anyone does when they start working with the Arduino is to connect it to a potentiometer and control the brightness of and LED or move a servo. Well, a rotary encoder may look like a potentiometer, but other than also having a knob, it is basically the complete opposite. A […]
A while back we covered the TEMT6000, a great little analog sensor for getting ambient light readings when you need something a bit more sensitive than a simple Photoresistor. Well in the spirit of documenting everything we can get our hands on, this week we will be taking the sensitivity to the next level with […]
Felxiforce is a force sensor that is very similar to FSRs we just wrote about in principal. They change their resistance when you apply force to them. (The flexi part of the name is because they are flexible) Felxiforces are about twice as expensive as their FSR cousins, but these are much more stable, and […]
You all know the potentiometer, you turn it, and you can read on your arduino where it was turned to. Well 3M makes a product called the softpot that is a linear touch potentiometer. So instead of turning a knob, you touch it. The really nice thing about these is that they are great for […]
A few weeks ago we showed you how to control your arduino over serial. Well this week are going to do the same thing. Only this time instead of using the serial monitor to send the commands, we will be using the Innovations ID line RFID reader. RFID, or Radio Frequency Identification, is basically a […]
This is something I use all the time, so I figured I would share it with you. Controlling an Arduino over serial can be extremely simple if you let it, and extremely useful if you know how to use it. Many languages such as Processing and ActionScript 3 (with a proxy) have ways to communicate […]
Once in a while something comes out that I think is going to be really awesome, but when you get it, it is just so so. Im sure you all know what I mean… But yeah… This is one of those. The RPI-1031 available from sparkfun is a pretty simple (heck, it is dead simple) […]
A while back we wrote an article on sensing orientation with the adxl335 accelerometer. In that article I mentioned all the drawbacks of trying to do this with just an accelerometer, and said that if you needed something stable, what you really needed was an IMU. Well… We are back with an article covering just […]
First off: I know… we went overboard with the motor illustration. In previous articles we have discussed how to control motors with simple transistors. And… with PWM you could control the speed. But that is just one motor, and you can only go one direction. Today we are going to talk about the TB6612FNG dual […]
In the past we have covered a few things that interact through serial, from RFID readers to controlling an Arduino’s pins using the serial terminal. Serial as we have talked about it is actually know as UART, and operates over 2 pins RX and TX (receive and transmit). These connections have previously been limited by […]
