Arduino

Gardening is a favorite pastime for many — and a healthy one. In fact, a recent study found that even a small home garden offers mood-boosting qualities that are similar to those provided by physical exercise.  However, one of the top concerns for many new or novice gardeners is how often to water their plants…

Arduino has a wide variety of applications. It can find its use in almost all fields. Its applications increase day by day because it’s open source and anyone can create a new set of functions and library to interface any new device with arduino. The given application demonstrates the use of arduino as tone and melody generator. It includes keypad and LCD for user interface. The music notes or melody is generated when the key is pressed and the frequency of generated sound is displayed on LCD. It illustrates keypad and LCD interfacing with Arduino along with tone – melody generation. The complete functionality of this project is due to the software program loaded into internal FLASH memory of arduino board microcontroller ATMega328.

Proximity sensors are used to detect something approaching near. These sensors are useful in many applications like collision avoidance, obstacle detection, path following, touchless sensing, motion detection, and object detection. There are different types of proximity sensors like optical, ultrasonic, capacitive, inductive, and magnetic. The capacitive, inductive, and magnetic proximity sensors are used in specific…

Much like the name suggests, DC motor controllers control the speed and direction of a DC motor. To change the direction of the motor, however, the supply it receives must be reversed. And, to vary the DC motor speed, a pulse-width modulation (PWM) signal or wave must be applied to it.  As the pulse width…

Light sensors are widely used in electronic applications. The most common one used is a photoresistor or light-dependent resistor. Despite a long response time, this sensor is inexpensive and useful in several applications. A photoresistor consists of a zigzag track of photo-sensitive semiconductors. It offers pure resistance although this is dependent on the ambient light.…

In the previous article, we learned how to send a message to scroll on a notice board from a smartphone using the Bluetooth application, and how to display the date and time. However, Bluetooth is only adequate for short-distance communication of about 10 meters. But what if it’s necessary to send notifications from a greater…

Remote data-monitoring systems have been widely used in nearly all manufacturing industries for many years and with several benefits. For example, these systems allow for the tracking, recording, and ongoing monitoring of data from different sensors — such as for temperature, pressure, flow, humidity, etc. — in a central control room of a plant.  Various…

A digital clock is a commonly used electronic gadget. A digital clock keeps track of time and displays the current time through an output device. The users can set or reset the clock using buttons. Electronic clocks are built using microcontrollers and may or may not use a real-time clock. Here, a digital clock is…

In the previous tutorial, we learned how to interface a buzzer with Arduino. A buzzer is an audio signaling output device. Embedded systems are built by interfacing several input and output devices with a controller or computer.  In this tutorial, we’ll interface an input device — specifically, a TTP229 capacitive touch keypad — with Arduino.…

In the previous tutorials, we learned about serial communication using the SPI (serial peripheral interface) and seven-segment multiplexing using the MAX7219 IC. We’ve also covered digital I/O, analog input, PWM (pulse width modulation), and all of the serial communication protocols commonly used by embedded controllers (the UART, I2C, and SPI).  This completes the basic coverage of the Arduino platform. With the above-mentioned skillsets, we…

In the previous tutorial, we learned how to interface a seven-segment display with Arduino. A seven-segment display is comprised of a unit of eight LEDs and seven of which are bar-shape and one is a dot. These display units are ideal for displaying numbers or letters. For example, they’re often used as a display unit…

Usually, the households have post paid electricity connections. On the consumer side, post paid connections have drawback that the consumption of electricity is not tracked by the consumers and many times they are shocked, when they receive high bills. The cause of getting high bills is usually not the high electricity rates but is the unconscious overuse of electricity. Prepaid electricity connections are usually suggested as the viable solution to this problem. In a prepaid electricity connection, consumer would need to recharge the amount of electricity they want to consume.In such a system, the household electricity meters need to be equipped with a system that could be acknowledged of the amount recharged by the consumer and could count down the electricity consumption from the recharged amount to zero. Once the meter reaches zero, the main supply would be automatically cut off and could be resumed only after the next recharge.

In the previous tutorial, we learned how to interface an ADXL345 accelerometer with Arduino by using the I2C bus. UART, I2C, and SPI are the most common serial communication protocols used in embedded electronics.  UART, a universal asynchronous receiver-transmitter, is used for full-duplex serial communication with a single device. The I2C, an inter-integrated circuit, is a master-slave,…

In the previous tutorial, we covered the I2C bus in Arduino. We also learned about using the wire library to communicate with the Inter-integrated circuit or I2C devices using Arduino boards.  The I2C bus is commonly used by digital sensors. When using this interface, hundreds of slave devices can be connected over just two wires. Each device —…

In the previous tutorial, we learned about serial communication in Arduino using the universal asynchronous receiver-transmitter (UART). We also discussed how Arduino can talk with a computer system using the UART protocol.  The UART is a dedicated circuit that implements serial communication according to its protocol. Arduino boards have one or more UART/USART. These UART/USART interfaces are available through…

In previous tutorials, we’ve covered serial communication using the UART and software serial in Arduino. The universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter (UART), I2C, and SPI are the most commonly used serial interfaces in embedded systems.  UART is useful for full-duplex serial communication with a single device over two wires. The I2C or two-wire interface (TWI) is used for half-duplex…

In the previous tutorial, we learned how to use the applications of the Matrix LED scrolling message boards. This included how to send a message or notice to display on such a board by using a laptop or desktop PC. In this article, we’re going to learn how to send that message from a smartphone…

This tutorial explains how to automate a hand sanitizer bottle. Sanitizers can be found for use at many public places (and especially recently, given the COVID-19 pandemic). However, each press of the cap leaves behind several types of germs on it. One way to avoid this is to automate the bottle so that users never…

Fading or controlling led brightness using arduino uno and potentiometer/variable resistor is not a very hard task. Arduino predefined libraries made it very easy to fade led with arduino uno. Whats going behind the arduino code predefined commands/instructions at software and at hardware level is important to understand. Students normally start with the pre-written arduino…

In the previous tutorial, we learned how to interface a DHT-11 sensor with Arduino. DHT-11 is a digital sensor that comes integrated with an 8-bit microcontroller. This integrated microcontroller outputs humidity and temperature values in the form of a 40-bit digital data packet.  In the last tutorial, we read the data packet by polling one…