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How to Run an Arduino for Years on a Battery

How to Run an Arduino for Years on a Battery
If you found this article after doing a search on Google, welcome! On this website you will find plenty of content around DIY home automation using open-source hardware. Enjoy the article! For most of the Arduino tutorials you will find on this website, power is usually not an issue as the Arduino is powered by the USB cable coming from the computer. For example, you want to power the wireless motion detector just by using a set of batteries. The first thing we need is to build our own Arduino system with just the minimal set of components. Hardware & Software Requirements You need several components to build you own Arduino system. In a previous project I used a FTDI breakout board to program the Arduino chip directly on the breadboard. To power the Arduino, you will need a battery. You will also need several components around the chip. Finally, you will need a breadboard and some jumper wires. This is the list of the components that were used in this article: Hardware Configuration

Arduino to Arduino Serial Communication | Robotic Controls Introduction It is possible to chain Arduinos together in such a way as to get communication between the two. Having Arduino-Arduino communication can be useful for many projects, such as having one Arduino to run motors and having another sense the surroundings and then relay commands to the other Arduino. This can be done in several methods, using I2C and Serial, to list a few. This tutorial will focus on Arduino-Arduino communication through the serial ports (RX and TX). Schematic The schematic below shows how to connect the two Arduinos together. There has to be a common ground between the two or else it will not function properly. Coding When sending things through serial, everything is sent in bytes. Simple Code The easiest way to get around this is to try to avoid using characters and numbers at the same time. Upload the Physical Pixel code, which can be found in the Arduino IDE under: File >> Examples >> Communication, onto one Arduino. On the other Arduino, upload: Complex Code

How to Build an Arduino on a Breadboard - Open Home Automation You might know that I am currently building a complete home automation system using open-source hardware. And one of the key part of this project is to build wireless sensors based on Arduino. Maybe you also have an idea and you want to build your own autonomous sensor or system based on Arduino. All these parts just take extra space and consume power for nothing when you want to build a system that does a specific task. Hardware requirements You need several components to build you own Arduino system on a breadboard. You will also need several components around the chip. Finally, you will need a breadboard and some jumper wires. Software requirements The focus of this article is mainly on the hardware configuration, but you need some software as well. Hardware configuration This project is quite complex to build, so be with me. The next step is to take care of the power. Now, we will focus more on the microcontroller. But if you want to program the chip in place, you need a final step.

Best ways to power a Arduino according to your need | Homautomation In this post I will describe what is the best way to power a Arduino according to your needs. Of course according to your needs, the way you power your Arduino system, is very important. If you want to make a system connected to a wall plug it is much easier than running an autonomous system on batteries for a while. Regulate power without power contraint Power adapter for Arduino board If you want to run your system over an Arduino board (typically Arduino Uno), It’s really simple. 5V regulator for standalone Atmega If you want to run Atmega in a standalone mode (as I described in a previous post), You’ll need to regulate power in order to provide 5v to the Atmega. It is easy to use in order to regulate any input voltage to 5V output voltage. Here is the schema for create this kind of regulation Making an autonomous system is more tricky. Why using a classic Arduino board is not a good idea? Arduino (Arduino Uno) board are not designed to be used in a such mode because: Optimizing code Sleepy

Sending float variables over Serial without loss of precision with Arduino and Processing or Python Last updated on Tue, 2010-11-30 16:58. Originally submitted by fabio on 2010-11-19 15:42. For a project I'm working on, I had the need to send some float variables computed on the Arduino board to a Processing program running on a computer over a Serial communication Link. Arduino doesn't have any "out of the box" way to send float variables over the Serial interface but one could simply send approximations: send the float as an integer and truncate the decimals or send it only with two digit for the decimals. Unfortunately, I needed the best precision for my project so the above solutions weren't actually useful. So, I came out with the following way: given that on both the Arduino and Processing have 32 bit floats and that both the ATMEL 328 (the microcontroller used by Arduino) and my i386 compatible PC are both big endian processors, I can split the float on Arduino into an array of 4 bytes. Then, I found 2 possibilities: using Serial.write() I can send them raw to the Arduino. Raw bytes

Control a Lamp From Your Smartphone Using the WildFire Board - Open Home Automation When it comes to building an home automation project using Arduino & WiFi, my favourite choice is usually the CC3000 WiFi chip. Even if this chip has some bugs (that can be solved by software), it is a great solution to give your Arduino projects a WiFi connection. However, you always have the issue to connect this WiFi chip to your Arduino board. As an example, we’ll make a simple WiFi lamp controller with this board. Hardware & Software Requirements Let’s first see what we need for this project. To control the lamp, I used a PowerSwitch Tail which allows to easily connect a lamp or any electrical device to your project. This is the list of the required components for this project: You will need to have the latest version of the Arduino IDE installed, as well as the following Arduino libraries: You will also need to follow this tutorial for the WildFire board, so you can configure the board from your Arduino IDE: Hardware Configuration if (!

How to run an Arduino (clone) on (AA) batteries for over a year – Part 2 | Hardware Startup A short while ago, I wrote a blog post about running an Arduino on batteries. That post was well received and got many upvotes, likes, tweets and comments (Thanks everyone!). That post discussed among other things getting rid of energy suckers, low-quiescent current regulators and the use of sleep-mode. This post will discuss how to connect your Arduino (clone) to simple AA/AAA or coin cell batteries, how to use interrupts to wake Arduino from sleep mode and how to make sure that other components like sensors are not eating all the energy from your battery. As some of you commented, apart from running an Arduino of a 9V battery, one can easily run an Arduino of 3V or 4.5V with AA/AAA or coin cell batteries (given that you sensors or other electronics don’t need a higher voltage). A last thing that one has to keep in mind is the selection and usage of the other components in the design. Let’s take for instance the motion detector that I was talking about. Like this: Like Loading...

Converting HEX as a String to actual HEX values | The Skyway Last night I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to go from a string containing “7E00101700000000000000000013380244320520″ which is an XBee API packet to actually writing those hex values to the XBee. The packet has been assembled with PHP and a database backing it. That data was echo’ed onto an HTML page which an Arduino (with an Ethernet connection) parsed. Basically what I did was reading the string one character at a time, here are bits of the code: As you can see I stored the data in a byte array. This is needed to properly convert the ASCII value to the hex value of each character. And there you have it, a string containing hex values as ascii is properly converted into actual HEX. Related

Home Automation with the ESP8266 - Open Home Automation This book is a very concise guide on how to use the ESP8266 WiFi chip to build home automation projects. The ESP8266 is a small, low-cost and low-power WiFi chip that received a lot of interest from the DIY & makers community when it was released. This little WiFi chip only costs $5, and comes with an onboard processor, which makes it the ideal chip to build open-source home automation projects. In this book, you will learn how to use the ESP8266 WiFi chip in several typical home automation projects. You will first learn how to create a simple temperature data logger using this chip. We are also going to learn how to build a motion detector based on the ESP8266. Then, you will use the onboard processor of the ESP8266 chip to make a completely autonomous lamp controller, that can be controlled from any device, wether it’s your computer or a mobile device.

Running Atmega328 in a standalone mode without Arduino Shield | Homautomation In this post I will describe how to use a Atmega328P chip without Arduino board. This kind of electronic circuit is much cheaper than an Arduino board and can be used with the same programming environnement and the same code to do exactly the same stuffs. Price : less than $10.00 Needed Hardware Arduino Uno The Arduino Uno will be used only as a programmer for the following circuit. A Atmega328P Price: $5.95 at Adafruit A 10kOhm Resistor Price: $0.10 at Digikey A 16Mhz resonator Price: $0.70 at Digikey That’s all Atmega 328P First of all you have to be familiar with Atmega328P (be careful it is better to use a Atmega328P instead of a Atmega328). Here is the Atmega328P datasheet. Ok, ok, there is a lot of text to read. Right now, you have to know that Atmega on an Arduino board is already loaded with the Arduino Bootloader. Load the Arduino Bootloader into the atmega328P To do so, we need to use an Arduino Board. Load Arduino ISP The project is now open, load it into the Arduino Uno Board. Done. Done!

A Swarm of Xbees! Arduino Xbee Wireless & More In the past we have covered a few things that interact through serial, from RFID readers to controlling an Arduino’s pins using the serial terminal. Serial as we have talked about it is actually know as UART, and operates over 2 pins RX and TX (receive and transmit). These connections have previously been limited by their required wires. So… what if you could drop the wire connection between the arduino and the RFID reader, or your computer and the arduino without adding much complexity? Well that is what Gerardo proposed with this article he wrote for bildr. Everyone hates long wires running from one end of the room to the other, and let’s face it, it’s aesthetically unpleasant. Series 1 vs Series 2/.25 A quick note here: This article does not cover the series 2 or series 2.5 XBee modules, and the series 1 and 2/2.5 are not compatible with each other. Choosing the right one for you getting started Hooking one up The supply voltage for the XBees is 3.3 volts, and it is a strict 3.3v. Code

EAS 199A: Fall 2012 :: Using Arduino This page provides links to class notes and on line instructions for the Arduino microcontroller platform. All students in EAS 199A are required to purchase their own Arduino board, which is part of the Sparkfun Inventor's kit. The kit is available from the Textbook Information Desk at the PSU Bookstore. See below for advice on avoiding pin 0 and pin 1 for digital I/O. Arduino Home From the Arduino home page: Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. On the Arduino web site you will find The getting started guide has detailed pages on installing the Arduino IDE: Install the Arduino IDE on Windows 7 ( the Arduino IDE on Mac OS X ( the Arduino IDE on Linux ( Manual for the Sparkfun Inventor's Kit Adafruit Tutorials Adafruit Industries designs and sells electronics kits and components.

arduino - How can a let my atmega328 run for a year on batteries?

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