Tag: Arduino

  • The Giving Tree and An Arduino Clock

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    When we bought our house we hired an electrician to install ceiling fans and lights. He worked, worked, and worked. My illusions of electrician’s work dissolved. Their work is a great deal more like laying bricks than solving equations. Oddly, the truth for electricians is also the truth for electronics. Nearly two years after starting,…

  • Wiring an Arduino to a Five-state Guitar Switch

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    I am rebuilding my Arduino-based data collection system. Named the RIMU for some long-forgotten and pointless acronym. My old one used a momentary switch—a button—to change which sensor is displayed on the LCD. It is awful because if the Arduino is busy when you push the switch then nothing happens. I’m fixing it with a…

  • Arduino Flickering Candle

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    Update December 24, 2013: Mokus refined his code so that the distribution is now well-behaved (nearly normal) and the PSD no longer turns up at high frequencies). The plots and post have been updated to reflect this change. He will push code to the same link as available. In my previous post on Candle Flame…

  • Candle Flame Flicker

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    For a project I wanted to make an LED flicker like a candle. I searched for the signal statistics of candle flicker, and I found no data. One student web site suggests that candle flame flicker is a 1/f-type random signal with roll-off of 20 dB per decade increase in frequency. Similar processes are typical…

  • Barbecued Ribs and Smoke Metrology

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    I made smoked ribs yesterday and tested out a new measurement system based on an Arduino, data logger shield, and a Sharp GP2Y1010 dust measurement unit. I didn’t have a long enough cable to get the smoke measurement unit inside the smoker, so I put it in my own contained pod above the smoker. By…

  • That Noisy Fan–Calibrated Measurement

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    I am working with the freetronics microphone module, which is described as having a sensitivity of “-40 dB typical”—let us assume it is dB (SPL) referenced to 20 micropascals root mean square (rms) at 1 KHz. When I think of an electronic element’s sensitivity, though, I’m thinking volts per micropascal and this is not provided.…

  • Arduino Analog Sample Rate

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    The Arduino Uno is not the ultimate signal processing machine, but it can do some light duty work on burst data. I had trouble finding the maximum sample rate the Uno can support, which is totally critical for most kinds of work. With native prescale Samples, type casts into floats, and stores in an array…

  • Refigured Data Logger

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    The RIMU data logger I built last year received a major upgrade. I added a sound pressure level meter to learn how noisy it is and updated the case to make the switches easy to find, label, and operate. It took a long time to get it working, mainly because I forgot that using the…

  • RIMU Calibration

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    I turned the freezer up to 7. I’m sure yours goes to 11, but I am not so lucky. After being turned up to 7, the resulting mean temperature is still too high at 18.8°F. And with that, we bid adieu to our refrigerator. It is around 20 years old—no way to be sure, and…

  • Freezer Swan Song

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    The last few weeks our ice cream sandwiches have been awful. I’m throwing away ice cream sandwiches, and I’m only marginally pickier than my dog. They’ve been gummy, almost squishy. We have been suspicious of the refrigerator since we smelled a hot electric odor—like burning dust. I monitored the fridge with the RIMU, and it…