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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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.
Continue readingTesting is not responsible for the bugs inserted into software any more than the sun is responsible for creating dust in the air.
(Dorothy Graham)
While I have talked a lot about bugs and debugging in my tutorial, I still have to tell you when to start debugging in the first place and why testing is an important task in the development process.
The featured image of this post is based on a picture by Here and now, unfortunately, ends my journey on Pixabay on Pixabay
… to screw in a lightbulb? The correct answer to this question is: “None, this is a hardware problem!” But then, this is not the right question! The right question is: “How many ISP programmers do you need to burn a program into flash memory?”
Continue readingDebugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
This quote is very much to the point, in particular, when one starts to create overly complex implementations. Keep it simple, stupid!
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?
Continue readingPremature optimization is the root of all evil
This quote, which is attributed to Knuth, Hoare, or Disjkstra, and which appeared first in print in a paper by Knuth 1974, does apply not only to code optimizations, as I learned it the hard way. It also applies to functional optimizations when you deal with a communication protocol, such as debugWIRE, of which there does not exist any official specification. Adding too many great new features before the basic framework works is a stupid idea.
The featured image is by Hebi B. on Pixabay
How can you use a stub in order to squash your software bugs? This blog post shows how to arrive in 7 easy steps at a working debugging solution using a gdb-stub for some 8-bit AVR MCUs. The only additional hardware you need is an ISP programmer in order to burn a new bootloader (well, if you are satisfied with a very slow-running program, you do not even need this).
Featured image: Clker-Free-Vector-Images on Pixabay
One of the most confusing things, in particular for newcomers, are the AVR fuses. Worse, by setting the wrong fuse bits, you can “brick” your MCU, i.e., a normal ISP-programmer cannot talk to the MCU anymore. In this blog post, we will present tools that help you to set the fuse bits right. And if push comes to shove, that is the wrong fuses have been burnt, I tell you how to recover …
Featured picture: OpenClipart-Vectors on Pixabay.
One has to add to the title (quoted from a tweet by Filipe Fortes) that the detective suffers from memory loss. Otherwise, the case could be solved easily. Similarly, with debugging: If I only knew what nasty things I have hidden in the source code, I could just remove them – but I simply do not know. In this blog post, we will have a look at what kind of tools one could use to find the skeletons hidden in the closet.
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