Tag: arduino

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Microcontrollers

Beverage-o-Meter

I have too many little dev boards and breakout boards and other components laying around here, picked up from cheap Hong Kong-based suppliers. I buy them thinking “oh yes, that would be handy” and then never do anything with them.
Today I have used two in one go. Blam! I made this, the Beverage-o-Meter:

Beverage-o-Meter

One Arduino, called the server (although the wireless boards are just peers with respect to each other), sends changes in the potentiometer’s position to the client (shown above), which rotates a stepper motor in sympathy, as it were, pointing at the beverage
desired. It is probably not that diplomatic a thing to plonk down in front of someone, so before deploying, work out a rota of who gets to hold the control.

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Electronics Microcontrollers Programming

Arduino Uno as USB HID keyboard – Part 2

In part one, I looked at the hardware side of things, and the steps required to get our Arduino Uno ready to emulate a USB keyboard. In part two, I show the software the Arduino and the BlackBerry will run.
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Categories
Electronics Microcontrollers

Arduino Uno as USB HID keyboard – Part 1

Introduction

Since getting a “modern” mobile phone (a Blackberry Pearl 3G 9105), I realised I was walking around with a configurable interface. That is, a little keyboard, and a display which could, with software, be both output or input (in a sense- I could draw a linear potentiometer, which I would control via the keyboard).
But also, it has comms- WiFi, 3G, and Bluetooth. The latter is particularly of interest to me, because it doesn’t involve any infrastructure, and adaptors to go from Bluetooth to serial are easy to get, and easy to use.
So the combination means being able to remotely (up to around 10-15m) control some microcontroller based device, from a custom, tailored interface that fits in my hand, and is self-powered.

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