If you own several badges, cards, or tickets and would like to automatically publish the number of unused badges on the web in real-time, there is no off-the-shelf solution. This post describes how to build such an IoT system.
Continue readingCategory: Low Power
How to save power
Connecting the AVR-IoT Cellular Mini Board to the Internet
The featured image of this blog post is based on a picture by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.
When you want to connect a sensor or actuator to the Internet and there is no WLAN around, then the next best option is LPWAN (Low-Power Wide Area Network). In this blog post, I will describe how to connect a sensor to a website using the AVR-IoT Cellular Mini board by Microchip.
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Drifting in the Flow of Time
The featured image of this blog post has been generated by Stable Diffusion.
What happens if you take a dozen clocks and throw them into the flow of time?
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Everything You Wanted to Know About Real-Time Clocks but Were Afraid to Ask
The featured image of this blog post is by Chen from Pixabay
What is a real-time clock? Why do you need one? What are the use cases? How accurate can a real-time clock be? Which features can a real-time clock have? Which models are around? And which one should you buy?
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A Sunset Cache Box
The featured image of this blog post has been generated by Stable Diffusion.
What does it take to build a geocaching box that can only be opened at sunset? A box, a button, an electronic lock, an electronic clock, and a controller that ties everything together.
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Parasitic Power Supply
The featured image of this post is by Emphyrio on Pixabay
In parasitic power supply mode, a device sucks its juice from a data line instead of from the power rail. This can be intended or unintended. In the latter case, all sorts of funny things can happen.
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Saving Energy by Choosing the Right MCU
Featured image is by Projekt_Kaffeebart from Pixabay
In this post, I take a look at whether there are significant differences of power consumption between the different AVR MCUs. I will look at the nominal values and also measure the power consumption in reality.
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Running on Batteries
Featured image by Andreluiz Cunha from Pixabay.
Running on batteries does not carry your Arduino project very far? Well, when you want to run an Arduino project on batteries, you have to spend some thought on minimizing power consumption. Here we will look at what you can do when you use an AVR MCU. Often you will be able to reduce the average current consumption to a few microamps!
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Pimp Your Pro Mini
The Arduino Pro Mini is a very minimalistic Arduino board with a small footprint. For this reason, it is an ideal candidate for being used as the target board in a battery-operated system. In this blog post I’ll show you how to minimize power consumption and how to burn a new bootloader that saves flash memory, allows debugging, and fixes an annoying WDT bug.
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Another Piece of the Puzzle
For a recent geocache, which is a tribute to the well-known Tetris game, I wanted people to solve a simple physical puzzle (as shown in the image above). As a reward, they get a code that they can use to open a box. So, what do you have to do to make things work? And how do you make sure that you do not have to change batteries for the next 20 years?
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