Arduino Measures Remaining Battery Power With Zero Components, No I/O Pin

[Trent M. Wyatt]’s CPUVolt library provides a fast way to measure voltage using no external components, and no I/O pin. It only applies to certain microcontrollers, but he provides example Ar…

A Mega-Tiny Arduino

Integrated circuits, chipsets, memory modules, and all kinds of other transistor-based technology continues to get smaller, cheaper, and more energy efficient as time moves on. Not only are the com…

Fail Of The Week: Epic 312 Weeks Of Fixing A Broken Project

If a hacker guardian angel exists, then we’re sure he or she was definitely AWOL for six long years from [Aaron Eiche]’s life as he worked on perfecting and making his Christmas Countdo…

Minimalist Homebrew Hardware Recreates Arcade Classics

Classic video games might look primitive by today’s standards, but the addictive gameplay of Breakout or Pac-Man remains fun no matter what decade you were born in. Keeping the relevant hardw…

The Inner Machinations Of The Arduino Are An Enigma

Arduinos have been the microcontroller platform of choice for nearly two decades now, essentially abstracting away a lot of the setup and lower-level functions of small microcontrollers in favor of…

Animate Arcane Protocols With Interrupt-Backed Bitbanging

We often take our “SoftwareSerial” libraries for granted, and don’t investigate what goes on under the hood — until they fail us, at least. Would you like to learn how to ha…

Time And Accuracy In Las ATMegas

Do you ever have to ensure that an exact amount of time passes between two tasks in your microcontroller code? Do you know what’s the difference between precision and accuracy? Today, [Jim Ma…

Solder Paste Dispenser Without Giant Compressor

We have certainly all had our moments with solder paste. Some of us hate it; it’s sticky and gooey, and it gets everywhere. That is, unless you have a solder paste dispenser. The trouble with…