Embedded Computing Design

For somewhere around a decade, I have relied on streaming for the majority of my television watching. This meant a computer in the early days, along with a surround sound home theater setup. At some point, however, we simplified to a single Roku Player and the TVs built-in sound.

Arduino boards, and the Arduino IDE is wonderful for creating small snippets of code that can activate an LED, read a sensor, activate a servo, or any number of unique physical computing applications. Such actions generally start out simple–e.g. blinking an LED on a timer–but can eventually become quite complicated as programs expand and the programmer’s skills increase.

Today, wireless networking technologies like WiFi and Bluetooth have taken over a huge amount of the world’s short distance data transmission duties.

The “perfect workbench” is of course a matter of opinion and personal needs. At this point, however, I’ve used and built several, so I’ll say that at least qualifies me to throw my opinion out there. While striving toward the optimal workbench has been (and still is) an evolution, not a careful plan, here’s a few things to look for in your bench:

It’s no exaggeration to say that 2020 was a challenging year.

While the Raspberry Pi works extremely well in a “headless” mode without a monitor, setting this up can be a little tricky. In this article we’ll go over how to do so specifically under macOS, allowing you to get your RPi remote computing node up and running without using an external monitor whatsoever.

Today you likely take access to the Internet for granted, using your phone for short bits of communication, or a computer connected via a router and WiFi or a directly wired connection for more serious input.

A little over a year ago I ordered my first printed circuit board (PCB) from OSHPark, which contained an ATtiny85, along with resistors and a few blinking LEDs. Since then I’ve designed several more boards, and fairly recently I made the switch to surface mount components.

As outlined in this November 2020 article, I recently switched from a PC to a Macintosh. Overall, I’m quite happy with the move, in a large part because it feels like they do all the “little” things right.

As you probably know, Raspberry Pi single-board computers, especially Pi 4 models, can get quite hot. While passive cooling options are often good enough to avoid overheating and thermal throttling, at some point you’ll need to think about using a cooling fan. The Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins don’t supply enough current to power even a small fan, but there are several ways to power and control a fan with the Pi.

Some time in the early 1990s, my parents got “their” first computer, a 386 SX by a company called “USA Flex.” This device had 640KB of memory, and a “turbo” button to go from 8 MHz to 16 MHz–a relief if that kind of blazing top speed was too intimidating–and came with Windows 3.

While it’s still a bit cold to ride a bicycle right now over much of the United States (and the Northern Hemisphere in general), here in Florida, it’s a great time to get outdoors. The only small problem is that as the sun sets fairly early until daylight savings time starts. It’s therefore quite possible then that you might end up being out beyond sunset, and in that case it’s a good idea to have a light to keep yourself visible to others.

In a previous article, I outlined how to connect to your Raspberry Pi via SSH, and noted how you can assign a Static IP address to allow you to consistently find it.

One might say that Arduino boards have been critical to today’s freedom of electronic experimentation, allowing normal people to make all manner of custom devices.

About 3 months ago I got a new laser cutting and engraving machine.

As a result of the current pandemic, more people than ever have been working from home. While there are definite drawbacks. As someone who has worked from home for years, I’d argue the positives far outweigh the negatives. Regardless of what happens in the future, I suspect that working from home will be, if not the "new normal," at least much more common.

In this post, I’ll go over a few tricks for setting up your user interface, as well as how you can automate things to potentially take yourself out of the loop completely!

Setting up and running your own Raspberry Pi home automation system is both fun and useful, and lets you have control of your devices without depending on “the cloud.”

While a Raspberry Pi is the central hub of this home automation system, It of course needs devices that work with it.

After setting up my father’s 386 SX–complete with a “turbo” button that let it perform at 16 MHz–many years ago, I’ve stuck with IBM/Microsoft, with the exception of a few forays into Linux.