Arduino talking to car engine management system

June 18 2009

Originally posted on Practical Arduino Just made a big step forward in the Car Engine Datalogger project with an ELM327 interface chip connected to the second serial port on an Arduino Mega: I can now issue data requests from the Mega and read the return value back from the engine… read more

Library for SHT15 temperature / humidity sensor

June 16 2009

Originally posted on Practical Arduino I need to talk to an SHT15 temperature / humidity sensor for one of the projects in Practical Arduino and there are a couple of good examples of how to do it, but I thought it would be nice to wrap it all up in… read more

Reading La Crosse weather station data

June 11 2009

Originally posted on Practical Arduino My friend Marc Alexander did a very fast reverse-engineering job on the wireless communications protocol used by La Crosse weather stations last week, and the result is that I now have this sitting on top of one of my monitors: The Arduino shield has a… read more

Video of Arduino as USB HID (fake keyboard)

June 07 2009

Originally posted on Practical Arduino Amelia helped me make a video showing the USB HID shield controlling Frozen Bubble, and we uploaded it to YouTube this afternoon: Or view directly at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJlDyPws7Mk read more

Input from PS/2 (or USB!) keyboard to Arduino

June 07 2009

Originally posted on Practical Arduino Time for a quick progress report on the PS/2 input project. Electrically it couldn't be much simpler. Connect the right wires in a PS/2 extension cable to +5V, GND, and two data pins, and the rest is all software. With this shield I can read… read more

Fake Keyboard used in Andy Gelme's "wearable computing" talk

June 03 2009

Originally posted on Practical Arduino Last night Andy Gelme did a cool talk at Linux Users Victoria where he demonstrated a gesture recognition system that uses a Lilypad Arduino sewn onto a shirt and connected to an accelerometer mounted on a sleeve using conductive thread. Our cunning plan had been… read more

It's on Amazon and we haven't finished writing it yet

June 01 2009

I was just checking out the new Author Blogs feature on Amazon.com when their system came up with a list of suggested books to associate with my profile - including Practical Arduino! Turns out it's already been issued an ISBN and a book page has been created for it. Wow,… read more

Progress on Arduino-as-USB-keyboard project

May 27 2009

Story from Practical Arduino Thanks to the assistance of Philip Lindsay who created the UsbKeyboard library for Arduino I got a USB shield working tonight that allows an Arduino to pretend to be a HID (Human Interface Device) such as a keyboard or mouse: This opens up a bunch of… read more

Arduino code highlighting in Vim

May 26 2009

A big thankyou to Johannes Hoff for putting together a Vim syntax highlighting file for Arduino development. Most people start their Arduino journey using the IDE but many then move on to using other tools, and for me personally my editor of choice has been Vim for so long I… read more

Tank level sensor hardware almost done

May 17 2009

The project I'm writing up for Practical Arduino at the moment is a tank level sensor that uses a differential pressure transducer to measure the difference in pressure between the atmosphere and the water at the bottom of the tank, which in turn allows the Arduino to figure out how… read more

Organising Arduino bits n pieces

May 17 2009

Trying to keep track of the parts for 40-ish Arduino projects at once has been a bit of an exercise in controlled chaos so this morning I went down to the Reject Shop and bought a stack more cheap kitchen containers with snap-on lids. Now things are much neater. This… read more

Arduino telemetry payload in a class C rocket

May 03 2009

Yesterday I headed over to a local trotting track with Thomas to meet up with Marc Alexander, Rohan Fernando, and their kids to do a couple of launches with Marco Ostini's class-C rocket fitted with an Arduino telemetry payload. Rohan brought a video camera and Marc brought a still camera,… read more

Much nicer RX-8 video

April 23 2009

Now this is how it *should* be done! Flame and his brother Bob have been working on getting a Geek My Ride TV show together for channel 31, and Bob just uploaded a little clip put together from footage collected during some test filming we did recently: Or for people… read more

Rocket flight data recorder

April 20 2009

With too many things going on at the moment it's nice sometimes when one project fulfills multiple requirements. Lunar Numbat is about playing around with rockets. Practical Arduino is about playing around with Arduino. Put them together and you get: Which is (obviously!) an Arduino-based rocket flight recorder. The bottom… read more

Rocket-Powered Easter Bunny

April 13 2009

My family and I spent the Easter long weekend at the in-laws place in Stawell. I happened to have a little hobby rocket with me (supplied by Marco Ostini so Andy and I could do some preliminary avionics testing for Lunar Numbat) and while sitting on the veranda munching on… read more