A Brief Introduction to Analog Signals on Arduino Boards [shorts #5]

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Some Arduino boards, like the MKR Vidor 4000, come with built-in digital-to-analog converters (also often simply abbreviated to DACs). With other popular development boards, for example, the Arduino UNO, you’ll have to live with a PWM pseudo-analog output. Or do you? This short article investigates the difference between true analog outputs and PWM pseudo-analog signals, and what you can do to get a true analog signal without having to own one of the more expensive Arduino boards.

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A simple custom I2C character LCD interface for Arduino projects

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Character LCDs are a fantastic and cost-effective option when your project calls for a user-friendly output method. Besides being cheap and easy to use, these displays often offer enough usable screen real-estate for displaying simple status messages and interactive menu screens. However, the standard 16-pin interface can be quite a hassle to work with, and all the wires quickly clutter up your previously simple Arduino project. While there are some I2C character LCDs out in the wild, these models are often more expensive and sometimes difficult to work with. Therefore, I decided to build a simple-to-use alternative that allows you to control pretty much any standard 14 and 16-pin LCD display with only four wires.

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Getting started with the Seeedstudio XIAO

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This video takes a look at the Seeedstudio XIAO board. In it, I unbox the device, take a look around it, assemble it, and I also show you how to prepare the Arduino IDE to get the XIAO up and running in no time!

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Building an Arduino based capacitive touch kitchen timer – Part 2

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This part of the Arduino based capacitive touch kitchen timer series discusses the hardware aspects of the project. In the last part, we took a look at the project idea itself, the goals, and skimmed over the theoretical principles behind capacitive sensing. So, it was now time to design a simple circuit and a PCB, which proved to be quite a bit more difficult than expected…

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Building an Arduino based capacitive touch kitchen timer – Part 1

Posted on by nerdhutblog

A dear friend of mine recently sent me a very interesting idea for a new project, and I decided to pick it up and got working at it as soon as I could. His idea was to build a digital kitchen timer that operates like the USB volume knob I built a while ago. I didn’t just want to recycle an old design, and the USB volume knob would be pretty unsanitary in a kitchen anyway. So we came up with a new idea that involves capacitive touch sensing and an Arduino, and this series of articles discusses each part of the project from the first idea, to the theoretical aspects, all the way to the hardware and software. I decided to write this series as the project goes along (similarly to the older word clock series), so things are subject to changes. However, I think this gives you a good opportunity to see just how much trial and error goes into such a project, and I hope I can help you avoid mistakes that I make by documenting them.

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Control a CRT with the Raspberry Pi DPI

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I managed to send video signals to a Mac Classic’s internal CRT monitor from a BeagleBone Black back in 2016, and it seems like this is a topic that a lot of people are still interested in. A recent discussion gave me the idea to try and do the same thing with a Raspberry Pi, and I wanted to document the experiment in this article.

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A simple universal 800×600 VGA signal generation circuit

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You may have seen this article where I discussed a 640×480 VGA signal generator that I designed and built. The signals, that circuit generated, were correct when measured with an oscilloscope. However, I concluded that I didn’t know why my display hardware had a hard time displaying an image and I found the reason for that and updated the circuit to generate the necessary signals for displaying an 800×600 image with a refresh rate of 60 Hertz.

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