Arduino musings

I wanted to learn something about modern day microcontrollers.   Along the way I made a fixture for burning a program into an ATtiny85 single-chip microcomputer.   The fixture sits on top of an Arduino Uno.   Then I wanted to learn something about LED strips so I tacked a 2-LED strip onto the fixture, quickest way to hook something up.   And when it ran Adafruit's LED strip test program it was really festive. So I put those functions on a PC board with a lithium battery and its support stuff.  Just for fun.  And I added a bright white LED for making a flashlight or strobe.   

I tacked two ws2812b "Neopixels" onto a homemade ATtiny85 programming shield and burned Adafruit's neopixel library and test program onto it.   It made a neat little holiday decoration.   And it ran on two NiMH AAA cells or a L-ion cell.   I decided to make a PCB.   It was a Covid project. I hand wired a prototype to test my component choices.   Works great, except I forgot to wire one of the pushbuttons and the charger indications don't work as expected. The PCB version was supposed to be identical.   The one difference, the ATtiny chip is in a surface mount package.   It's been months since I set up the prototype, so I tried burning a new program in it and everything still works the same. The PCP version accepts an "upload" from the Arduino IDE and the sketch runs.  Reads its buttons and blinks its bright white LED.   But when it sends a message to the Neopixels, they turn bright white.   No matter what colors in the message.    What could be going on?

 Pet peeve.   The front page of a software product's web site should tell you what the product is and does.   There should be links about how to get it, and an online version of the manual.   And a link to a current status page. Not a blog about developer gossip or release schedules.   Not how wonderful it will make you feel.   Not how it's better than that other thing, unless that crappy other thing is its whole reason to exist.    I think the thing at this web site might be a software distribution capable of installing a full featured desktop operating system on PC hardware, like FreeBSD or Debian.   Or it might be a hosted virtual-desktop-in-the-cloud service.   Or both and they're synchronized, that would be really cool.   It would be the community owned and directed version of Chromebook.   They went partway there with  the phrase "using a stable Ubuntu long-term release as its core" but does that mean anything to you?  What the fuck *is* this thing?    And W

 Old farts are supposed to bore you with war stories.  I told one on Facebook.   I'll elaborate on it here. It's 1984 and I'm on a team at Motorola where marketing wants something like a Macintosh but it runs unix and lives on a network.   Motorola/Four Phase (across the street from Apple in Cupertino!) is not up to this task as a company.   But my team is going to build a system with Motorola technology that can run demos and look like an office machine.  We're gonna learn a lot and it will be hard and intense and really fun. A few months later and I've got a workstation hardware prototype chassis running. It's got a Motorola MC68010 16-bit  microprocessor in a socket.  (Back then CPUs didn't get warm enough to need a heat sink.  You could just pry it out of the socket with a little screwdriver.)   And it's got bit mapped graphics and a mouse! My department was about to receive engineering samples of Motorola 68020 (32-bits) and there wasn't a socke

 QUESTION [on Facebook]:  What did people do before Arduinos?  I assume projects were trial and error. Or others built their own microcontrollers.  BACKGROUND: -I'm an absolute beginner to Arduino but not a total newbie to hobby electronics . -In my younger days I remember having a large bread board plugged in the wall and I put in my different components. My projects worked or didn't.  -I assume Arduino is able to test projects and preprogrammed to control projects. My answer got some likes.   Arduino raised the bar on integrated development environments for low end single chip microcomputers. It's platform agnostic and still manages to deliver a working tool chain. Install software package, launch and go. No fiddling around with jtag or prom burners or writing your own loader any more. No more paying the chip vendor $Ks for his proprietary tool chain. Made the tech way more accessible. "What did people do before?" In 1979 and 80 I built a "system" arou

You might not get the latest boot loader that way. You can buy a replacement ATmega328PU with or without the Arduino bootloader preinstalled. Adding the bootloader roughly doubles the price for single quantities by mail. I suggest a third option. Buy an Arduino Nano clone (cheapest Arduino) and a blank ATmega328-PU (28-pin DIP). Look at  how to use the Arduino As ISP sketch . It's in the Examples sketches. Use the Nano, six jumper wires, and your empty Uno board to program a blank 328 with a new bootloader. (There are nine million tutorials. Pick a few, and notice they all have mistakes or missing steps, but you can get the procedure by doing the things they all agree on.) Save your 328-PU with the missing pin. When you get good at soldering, you can repair it or solder it onto a carrier. And now you know how to update its bootloader. Here are three links I posted with this on FB. Microchip formerly known as Atmel ATmega328-PU  probably not counterfeit at Digi-key.     ATmega328-PU