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HACEduino Protoshield Kit A

Monday, 21 December 2009 23:00 |

Written by Adrian Hum |

After working with you Arduino for a while, you may decde to finalize your project. While breadboards allow you to quickly design and change your experimental design, your breadboard circuit can easily be damaged, short or allow components to come loose. So, you may decide to make your design a little more robust by soldering your components into place. However, because your design is still experimental, you have the problem that you aren't quite ready to design your own custom PCB for the job. So, what can you do?

Being an experimenter myself, I decided that a prototyping shield would be the best idea for my design before I went for a custom PCB. The design would be robust, neat and not subject to shorting and bad connections that a breadboard would cause.

You could of course use some standard perf-board to solder your design down, however due to the Arduino's somewhat unique connectors, you will end up with a series of connections back to the edge connections.. A shield would be better because it would eliminate the need for wires.

Prototyping this way, ensures that your functional, performance, and power requirements are being met, and you can still change your design as necessary. In this way you will not need to invest in the cost or effrt of a custom PCB until you are completely satisfied with your prototype.

Last Updated (Monday, 21 December 2009 23:02)

Doing Electronics: PWM (Pulse Width Modulation)

Monday, 21 December 2009 21:25 |

Written by Adrian Hum |

Pulse-width modulation (PWM) is a very efficient way of providing intermediate amounts of electrical power between fully on and fully off. A simple power switch with a typical power source provides full power only, when switched on. PWM is a comparatively-recent technique, made practical by modern electronic power switches.

In the past, when only partial power was needed (such as for a sewing machine motor), a rheostat (located in the sewing machine's foot pedal) connected in series with the motor adjusted the amount of current flowing through the motor, but also wasted power as heat in the resistor element. It was an inefficient scheme, but tolerable because the total power was low. This was one of several methods of controlling power. There were others—some still in use—such as variable autotransformers, including the trademarked Autrastat for theatrical lighting; and the Variac, for general AC power adjustment. These were quite efficient, but also relatively costly.

Last Updated (Wednesday, 23 December 2009 01:29)

Product Details: HACEduino "2009/nano"

Monday, 21 December 2009 21:23 |

Written by Adrian Hum |

Finally, we are ready o release our HACEduino 2010/nano. The 2010/Nano is an all-in-one Arduino board perfect for use with a medium or large breadboard. All it needs is a source of power supplied via a mini-usb cable (supplied!). The HACEduino 2010/nano is based on the Arduino Nano 3.0 includes the ATmega328 microcontroller, which provides twice the memory of the previous ATmega168.

Of course our HACEduino "2010/nano" is a powerful development board based on the ATMEL ATmega328P-AU AVR microcontroller, and HACEduino "2010/328" is still FULLY compatible to Arduino Nano 3.0.

Last Updated (Monday, 21 December 2009 21:30)

Creating A Linux Arduino Development Enviroment

Monday, 21 December 2009 21:20 |

Written by Adrian Hum |

I started playing with my haceduino 2009 and couldn't get it to upload sketches to my board, I played for a while trying to hit the reset switch at different times but with no luck.

I hooked the board up to a windows machine and had it uploading almost right away so this led me to my Linux machine being at fault. What to do, what to do....

So last night I played with a few different Linux distros to find one that works "right out of the box" so to speak. It had to be a mainstream distro, had to be a clean install and only need packages available from the repos so as not to have to revert to compiling from source.

This guide is to set up a machine from scratch with the latest Ubuntu release 9.10, it should work with kubuntu and xubuntu as well but I offer no warranty as to the sutablity of this guide to your own hardware and setup.

Last Updated (Tuesday, 22 December 2009 23:45)

Product Details: HACEduino "2009/328"

Monday, 21 December 2009 21:16 |

Written by Adrian Hum |

The HACEduino "2009/328" is a powerful development board based on the ATMEL ATmega328P-PU AVR micro controller, and is still FULLY compatible with the Arduino Duemilanove and its shields, so basically it is an Arduino clone.

When you purchase a HACEduino "2009/328" you will get a board with a small micro controller, this is a whole computer on a small chip, in this case it is an ATMEL AVR ATMega328P-PU.

The HACEduino's design is quite simple, and its design was intended so as the micro controller could easily communicate with a variety of devices, and could be programmed with your computer with a simple design IDE or Integrated Design Environment without the need for sophisticated hardware to program it. In fact, the software, your HACEduino and a handful of components are all that you need to get started.

Last Updated (Monday, 21 December 2009 21:30)

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