New Arduino Leonardo

Another board from Arduino.cc

Arduino have announced another micro-controller board based on a new ATmega32u4, this processor also takes care of the serial communications with the host PC negating the need for a separate serial to USB chip.

There are a few other differences between this board and the trusty UNO: -

• A micro USB connector. At last!
• The SPI bus on the ISP connector no-longer uses any IO pins.
• The device will act as a USB keyboard or mouse to the host PC.
• The board is available with or without the headers, without being slightly cheaper.

I looked at some UK suppliers but they were not showing availability until the 11th of June so it might be worth getting your pre-orders in now.

Also there is an update to the Arduino IDE available, this adds support for the Leonardo as well as multiple language support as well as other changes.

Download link here

Release notes here

Electric Imp

Today I came across a news article on Engadget about a new development that promises to allow you to connect almost anything that uses electronics to the internet and to each other.
It's called the Electric IMP and it's essentially an ARM Cortex M3 and WiFi built into an SD card space envelope, it looks exactly like and SD card, it even has the same contacts.

To set up the WiFi connection there's an app for both the Iphone and Android devices which takes the setup information for your Wifi and then transmits them to the Imp by flashing the screen on and off, the Imp reads this data through the front of the card and sets up the WiFi.

Once connected the code, written in Squirrel, is edited in your browser, on their server (I think) and downloaded into the Imp via the WiFi connection.

The other interesting aspect is that they provide a service on their servers which allows you to connect your Imps together visually, using blocks, and writing code to interconnect them across the Internet so they can talk to each other.

You can also create virtual Imps that are used to connect to Internet services outside the Imp servers, I assume that you could set up a virtual Imp to wait for a tweet from you to switch on the lounge light and that would then be sent to you real Imp, at home, which would then switch on the light or even monitor the temperature at home with an Imp and get a virtual Imp to send you a SMS message when it reaches a certain temperature.

The possibilities seem endless. They are showing some development hardware to go with the Imps the most interesting (for me) is the Imp enabled Arduino, the Duino.

The Dunio seems to be a full standalone Arduino clone with a twist, the twist being an Imp slot instead of the normal USB connector, this means that you write the Arduino code in the Arduin IDE (modified?) and then send the code to the Duino via the WiFi so your Duino can be anywhere in the world, with a WiFi connection.

Remote temp. sensing with GLCD and Jeenodes

It's been a while since I purchased the Jeenodes, the original intention was to get them talking to each other using the wireless tranceivers and the graphics display board to dosplay the received temperatures.
Anyway, life happens and I got distracted and they were put in a drawer .... time went by and I got interested again.
So I've now managed to get the Graphical LCD (GLCD) working and displaying the temperatures and other data from the remote transmitter.
The plan is to have a Jeenode mounted in a waterproof box outside, monitoring the outside temperature and also, using a magnetic reed switch, monitoring the status of the side gate.
So far I've managed to get a Jeenode sending the data from two DS18B20 digital temperature transmitters once every second, then I was able to get the GLCD from Jeelabs to display the temperatures in a normal font.

I decided that the fonts need to be a bit bigger, so it could be easily read from a short distance, this wasn't as easy as I thought it would be, it requires a lot of thought about how many pixels are required to display the temperature.  One disadvantage, albeit a small one, I found with the new library that allowed large fonts was that it didn't clear unused pixels when a new character was drawn over the top of the old one.

A quick visit to the Jeelabs help forum soon pointed me in the right direction, you have to draw a white rectangle over the characters just prior to writing the new ones to the screen, I thought this was a bit of a pain but in reality it's quite simple to add that line prior to any text you send to the display and it isn't noticeable as flicker.  The tricky bit is counting the pixels used in the width across the characters to ensure the rectangle only covers the temp and nothing around it and choosing the font was a bit of trial and error picking the various ones available as I couldn't find a printout of what all the fonts would look like and there are a lot of fonts.

Now I've just got to find a suitable box to put it in, sort out a battery and read up on getting the sketch to consume as little power as possible, I'm waiting for the single AA power board to arrive from Jeelabs.

Using Notepad++ as the editor for Arduino Sketches

I've started using Notepad++ again after a long break from programming my Arduinos and Jeenodes and found that you can use NPP to edit the .ino files and then use the NPPexec script to run the Arduino IDE and load the sketch, then you can just compile and upload.
To set this up follow the video below: -

Once you have the script
D:\My Documents\Downloads\arduino-1.0\arduino.exe "$(FULL_CURRENT_PATH)"

You can add it as a macro by pressing F6 and pasting it into the execute dialog and saving it.

Arduino and Pachube

I've not played with the Arduino for some time but this weekend I dusted it off and decided to have go at getting it logging some data and uploading it to Pachube.
This was due mainly to a conversation at work, extolling the virtues of the Arduino and how simple it was to connect to the internet.

So after getting the hardware out of the box and overcoming all the library related issues with using the newer Arduino 1.00 instead of 022 I started to look for some code to use as the basis of my little project.

Firstly I found the Pachube example from the Arduino website here, this sketch gives you all the basics to upload a data stream to Pachube.

The code has sections at the top to setup your access information to Pachube so first you need to get an account with Pachube, it's free for a basic account.

#define APIKEY         "YOUR API KEY GOES HERE" // replace your pachube api key here
#define FEEDID         00000 // replace your feed ID
#define USERAGENT

1. Visit www.pachube.com and signup for an account.
2. Log into Pachube and setup a feed.
3. Add a datastream, this will be you sensor data, type in "sensor1" to match the example sketch and save.
4. Create a key for your feed using "My keys" on the right.

Now you can replace the APIKEY text in the sketch with the key you've generated on the Pachube site, FEEDID with the number you find on your edit feed page, near the bottom, just use the number after the /feeds/.

I used my feed title to replace USERAGENT.

I then loaded the sketch into the Arduino and off she went.

Log into your Pachube account to see if the data is updating.  There is some useful help if it doesn't seem to work, on the right select the "Debug info" item and this takes you to a log of the data that Pachube is receiving.

You can see from the request body that I have some extra data added that's not part of the example sketch, this is temperature data from a DS18B20 temp sensor, I'll show the extra code to get this done in my next Blog post.

There are also lots of ways to view the data on the web: -

1. On the Pachube website.
2. Adding a graph to your own blog, see top right.
3. Using the embedded graph code on your own website.
4. Using a gadget on you iGoogle home page.
5. Using an App on you Apple Ipod touch or Iphone.
6. Using an App on you Android Phone.

Micro Oscilloscope

Sometime ago I blogged about an interesting micro oscilloscope, (post) well it's now available to buy in the UK from www.coolcomponents.co.uk for £31.

I like the idea of this scope but it's a bit small but I beleive that it will get a PC based front end to view the scope data on the PC, this may be a cheap alternative to the picoscope!

iSmart TFT Modules

I've recently discovered these iSmart TFT modules, which combine an ARM9 processor core with a 480x272 colour resistive touch display, 24 I/O lines, RS232, USB, I2C interfaces and an RTCC plus more!

The module uses its own programming language to control a collection of pre-defined screens, up to 100,and also control the I/O and external interfaces. These programmes are written in a text editor and stored on a uSD card, when the module powers it runs a file called TU480a.mnu, this contains the code.

The language is very different to C and is an object orientated type more like html, each "entity" is given a style, this is then used whenever the entity is used on the screen.

The website can be found here
 
The programme can be loaded into NAND so it can be run without the uSD card inserted and you are able to send data to and from the screen via the serial port so I assume it will work in conjunction with the Arduino platform, at least that's what I'm hoping!

So far I've just loaded a couple of screens, which I generated in Open Office Draw and then grabbed the screen and re-sized to fit, and then added a couple of touch areas to switch between them.

For the Arduino community there is the problem with there being no libraries so everything would need to be done in code and also another thing to note is that it's not open source code or hardware.

The price is around 90 Euros + VAT for the 4.3 inch version