“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
— George Bernard Shaw
Month: August 2013
Avoid problems!
“A clever person solves a problem, a wise person avoids it.”
— Albert Einstein
How to control any infrared device using Arduino
If you want to control your TV, Ar-conditioner or any other device that uses a infrared remote control using an Arduino, then you need to know this project:
http://www.righto.com/2009/08/multi-protocol-infrared-remote-library.html
The source code is available at github:
https://github.com/shirriff/Arduino-IRremote
NOTE: This tip could be used for people looking for Timer/TPM programming for Freescale Kinetis: https://community.freescale.com/thread/309444
Controlling a LED strip using a Lilypad board
I’m using this example to control my LED strip:
http://bleaklow.com/2012/12/02/driving_the_ws2811_at_800khz_with_a_16mhz_avr.html
Just download the source code from here:
http://sourceforge.net/p/abavr/lib/ci/21a95bf1f6c437cac414e8efb0c80558e5c369db/tree/WS2811/
Compile it using the tips from this site:
$ avr-gcc -g -Wall -Os -fno-inline-small-functions -fno-split-wide-types -mshort-calls -mmcu=atmega328p -DF_CPU=16000000L threepixeldemo.c -o led -std=c99
Generate the Intel HEX file:
$ avr-objcopy -j .text -j .data -O ihex led led.hex
Flash it on your board:
# avrdude -p m328p -c usbasp -e -U flash:w:led.hex
Connect the VCC and GND to your board and to LED strip. Then connect the IN wire from LED strip to Lilypad pin label 8.
UPDATE: This guy implemented a PWM to control this WS2811 LED strip: http://techblog.zenrobotics.com/2013/04/bit-banging-ws2811-led-strips-with-pwm.html
UPDATE2: Nice tutorial to getting started with AVR and GCC: http://www.micahcarrick.com/tutorials/avr-microcontroller-tutorial/getting-started.html
Open Source Movement
“Open-source puts the ability to change the world into everyone’s hands.”
— Julie Uhrman
Understanding Electronics Components
This is a nice open book about electronic components, very good for beginner and for profissionals as well:
Measuring low current using a low cost solution
Instead using very expensive probes as these Agilent, this guy find out a nice way to measure low current consumption:
http://www.dorkbotpdx.org/blog/paul/measuring_microamps_milliamps_at_3_mhz_bandwidth
We could to implement a board using this solution and sale it for about USD 50,00.
Wardriving on your pocket using Android
A reason I was wanting most to install Ubuntu in my Android smartphone was to get Aircrack program working. No more the main need, because these guys hacked Broadcom chip and got airdump working on Android:
They also managed to get everything working without kernel modifications, just userspace application to inject a modified firmware into WiFi chip and to issue right ioctls to kernel. Then you just need to install an APK and everthing is done. Unfortunately only for BCM4329/30, but fortunately this WiFi chip is very common. My Sony Xperia S is using BCM4330 and it worked like a charm.
Alan C. Assis 