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(November 2012 - January 2013) SMD LED Test Board The 1984 Heathkit Catalog Building a Dedicated Bootloader Board for New ATmega328P Microcontrollers Ask Fran: Build Your Own Friction Welder! Do It Yourself Digital Fireflies Fran's Dangerous Toys: The Jacob's Ladder Ask Fran: AM Radio |
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Highlights of the 1984 Heathkit Catalog    |
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for New ATmega328P Microcontrollers (December 2012) The very first thing that I tried to do when I began my Digital Firefly Jar project was to burn bootloaders to newly manufactured ATmega328P microcontrollers. I knew that to reproduce my project I would need to make multiple programmed ATmega328's and in anticipation of doing many Arduino projects I bought the chips in bulk. I knew that I would have to burn bootloaders to all of them in order to upload and use my sketches. I bought a used Arduino Duemilanove to do this, and there was a clearly laid out tutorial about burning bootloaders on a breadboard on the Arduino site. It seemed like a no brainer - an easy task - but it wasn't... It just did not work! Many attempts using the set up in the Arduino tutorial met with no success, so I went to the blogs and saw that many people were having problems doing this, and there were as many apparent solutions as there were issues. I tried every configuration from every blog I could find on the topic: adding pull up resistors, changing power supply, altering settings, changing cables, etc.... but nothing worked. The afternoon I spent trying every one of these configurations to burn a bootloader met with nothing but errors. So I decided to go a different
route and tried the dedicated
bootloader board project suggested by Ladyada
that used a very nifty
Arduino sketch that had the Duemilanove's ATmega328 do the task, and
this elegant set up works flawlessly. Success! And a really
cool project too!
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A fun project coded in Arduino for the ATmega328 Microcontroller (December 2012) This was a simple little project that was really just an excuse for me to learn Arduino. I bought some really attractive Ball canning jars at the market and thought that it would be really cool to use them to make some kind of bedside firefly jar. I thought that I would use an array of RC transistor timers to drive some vintage 70's amber lens LEDs I had in stock. But I wanted these virtual fireflies to act like the real thing, and I soon realized that there would have to be 4 separate operations to depict a realistic firefly blink, with a quick fade-on period, a brief stay-on period, a slower fade-off period, and a long off-rest period. Visualizing the large array of discrete RC timers I would need to create several fireflies was going to be prohibitively complex to shove into a jar lid, so I thought that this would be a really good job for a microcontroller. Read more....  
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