atmega

Makey Awards 2012 Nominee 12, Atmel, Most Hackable Gadget

Last year, when Phil wrote his widely-read Why Arduino Won column, searching “arduino” on the Atmel website didn’t return even a single hit. Since that time, Atmel has started taking notice, linking out to Arduino resources from their “Education” pages, issuing their own press releases to support important Arduino-related events, sponsoring Arduino-themed contests, and more. They joined us at BAMF 2012 and we are looking forward to seeing them, again, at World Maker Faire NY at the end of this month.

Continue Reading September 10th, 2012 Sean Michael Ragan30

Open Music Labs on the ATmega328p ADC

Here’s an amazing article from Open Music Labs which provides an in-depth explanation of the inner workings of the ATmega328p ADC, and how to squeeze every last bit of performance out of it.

Continue Reading February 14th, 2012 David Cranor6

Understanding pull-up and pull-down resistors

When I first got involved in digital electronics, it took me awhile to understand the concepts of pull-up and pull-down resistors and when to use up or down, and when to use internal (built in, programmable) resistors, and when to use actual, discrete component, resistors. On Youritronics (a name that will always make me wince), […]

Continue Reading March 5th, 2009 Gareth Branwyn14

DIY LED Valentine’s Day heart

The folks at NerdKits, who gave us the DIY Marque LED Array Project, now built on that project with the DIY LED Heart for Valentine’s Day. Using their USBNerd Kit, 20 red 5mm LEDs, and some cardboard, Humberto shows you how to create an electronic Valentine’s heart that twinkles and prints out messages o’ love […]

Continue Reading February 3rd, 2009 Gareth Branwyn

DIY ATmega168 evaluation board with LCD screen

Dave Prochnow writes on PopSci: Every AVR programmer worth her weight in ATmegas knows about the AVR Butterfly–a ridiculously low cost ATmega169 demonstration and evaluation kit. Lamenting the lack of such a kit for the ATmega168 drove me to design my own demo/eval kit for the Arduino microcontroller family. This project became a compulsion that […]

Continue Reading December 29th, 2008 Gareth Branwyn2

HOW TO – use Arduino as a high voltage programmer

From the MAKE Flickr photo pool If you should accidentally disable the reset pin while programming an AVR chip, you’ll lose the ability to rewrite to it using common ISP programming devices. To make the chip writable once again, you’ll need a ‘high voltage programmer’ that runs off of 12V. With an Arduino and some […]

Continue Reading September 25th, 2008 Collin Cunningham