UptownMaker

I'm so down with Atmel's Qtouch library . Basically, it lets you add capacitive touch detection to your projects- and it works through non-conductive surfaces. Think touch-sensitive sealed keypads, or the scroll wheel from the older generation of iPods. Nobody- as near as I can tell- has this working with the Arduino environment yet. It should be doable, because you can do it in AVRStudio compiling code through WINAVR, which is just a distribution for AVR-GCC, which is what Arduino compiles its code with. I'm working on it, but here, in the meantime, is a walk-through of getting the Qtouch demos working with the '328P found on the Arduino board (under Windows- don't bug me about figuring out how to use it in Linux): 1. Download and install AVRStudio from Atmel- annoyingly, you have to fill in a long-ish form with the standard information about who you are and what you're doing. This is not, in and of itself, TOO annoying- but the fact that they make you d...

A few weeks ago, I purchased 10 Atmega328P's from Mouser , naively thinking it would be easy enough to get them working on a breadboard as an Arduino sans the fancy (expensive) board. I was planning to use an FTDI USB to TTL serial data cable to bootload (I bought a 5V one, then realized that the two 3.3V ones I already had would work fine- lesson one of this saga). I also bought a some 16MHz crystals and the appropriate capacitors. At this point, I want to extend my thanks to whomever it was that decided a 6-pin AVRISP compatible ICSP header would be a value-add to the Arduino. I know that 95% of the Arduino users out there will NEVER use it, but I am very grateful. So, first hurdle- I figure I'll take one of the 328s and upgrade my Arduino (it was one of the, what, six? Duemilanove's that shipped with a 168 from the factory). Supposedly, the Arduino IDE has the capability of loading the bootloader onto a blank chip through an AVRISP, but I'll be buggered if I co...

I like the Arduino as a simple computing platform, but I've mentioned here before that I'd like to offload some of the more basic functions to a co-processor to let the Arduino have more CPU cycles for other stuff. That's true for many, MANY tasks, and one of the ones I've been fascinated with since college is the capturing and parsing of data from an infrared remote control. Adding IR to your project is a SUPERB way to add very complex I/O. I'm not sure if the Arduino has a library to read IR from remote controls, nor do I care, because it's likely to suck up an unacceptable number of CPU cycles. Thus, the IRduino: a shield with a small microprocessor (I'll probably use a PIC, since I know how to work those much better than AVRs) which decodes the signals from infrared remotes, packs it into three or four bytes (there are actually a LOT of possible codes out there, due to the number of encoding schemes). There would then be several options for sending t...