ATmega 8 / 168 internal clock and fuse settings Considering the already low price of the Arduino board, building an Arduino-like board yourself probably doesn’t save you any money but is certainly a fun and education project to do. I tried to make the simple board even simpler, by using a Serial instead of an USB Port, the ATmega’s internal clock instead of an external crystal, and requiring 5 VDC instead of providing any kind...

I have been playing with Arduino for one week now and really enjoyed the simplicity with which Wiring allows access to I/O ports. The comprehensible but mandatory structure of a program works really well as long as things are kept simple, while somewhat more advanced programs could certainly benefit from access to interrupts. However, before making things more complicated on the Software side, I wanted to replace Arduino’s...

Taking advantage of strong disagreements inside Germany, the Italian feudatories rebelled and, in 1002, elected Arduino, Marquess of Ivrea, king of Italy. He distinguished himself particularly because of his fights against the Bishop of Ivrea. Today, Arduino distinguishes itself in price, capability, openness, and ease of use – but first things first. Arduino is an open-source computing platform based on a simple board, and a...

Later this week, I’ll be at the OCEJUG, Orange County Embedded Java Users’ Group, to give a presentation titled: Innovate – Tweak, Hack, and Bend Technology, showing how a small device, about the size of an iPod Shuffle, but capable of executing Java-Byte-Code, is turned into a Web server. After taking a very close look inside the workings of a digital toy camera, we will connect it to the embedded device, creating a...

TIVO and ReplayTV introduced us to a new way of watching television, conveniently time-shifted watching. A disposable recording of previously selected content allowed us to consume the TV broadcast whenever we wanted; maybe just 15 minutes delayed, to skip over commercials, the next day, or whenever we felt was a good time to watch it. Anyway, time-shifted watching has changed the way we watch TV today and with the exception of sporting...