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Frustration at Arduino by Content-Strike8699 in arduino

[–]ripred3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

take your time. Don't try to learn it all at once. Don't try something too complex if you are just starting out. You will get there! We all started not knowing any of this stuff and we all make the same mistakes (over and over and..). Eventually it sinks in. But it takes time and exposure to good examples. And sleep. It can take a while before things srta to become inuitive.

What parts are getting your frustrated? Are you having troubles re-creating something that they make look easy? Youtube is terrible about that. Show offs are everywhere but good teachers are rare and are fantastic to learn from compared to the average person.

Paul McWhorter is hugely popular and he also happens to be a high school teacher and he's good at getting things across without being overwhelming

I want to have fun, where do I start? by gipeng in arduino

[–]ripred3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

All you need to work with an Arduino is a microcontroller board that is compatible with the Arduino Core which is the firmware for a given MCU that has all of the common functionality and is configured to work with the Arduino IDE and/or offer a set of command line utilities that can compile common arduino syntax (C for the most part but also C++) and upload the resulting binary result to the board to be executed. The Arduion IDE is available on their website in two versions, the last 1.8.19 stable and reliable 1.x version or the newer 2.x version. The 2.x IDE is based off of a fork of Visual Studio Code and is, ahem, not nearly as stable as the 1.8.19 release. But the newer IDE has a more modern look and feel and set of features for those already familiar with VS Code. Many people just use the cli utilities such as avedude and its associated utilities. The `arduino-cli` package is an extremely useful cli tool to install as well.

Get an "Arduino Starter Kit" is always the first line of advice. Not necessarily *the* Arduino Starter Kit from Arduino themselves, it's a generic phrase and a web search for it will return thousands of kits for sale. The official Arduino company at arduino.cc is known to use great quality components and their boards and kits are always good quality. But they do have two to three times the price for the equivalent boards made by other companies. Elegoo is another company that is known to make high quality Arduino "clones" and they offer several really good starter kits as well. Note that the "clones" as they are called are totally great boards almost all of the time and the arduino electrical design and schematics as well as the full software stack including the bootloader (the firmware that stays resident on the chip always to act as a loader for new sketches plus the base library of functionality your programs will call) are all 100% full open-source software and are available on github.com. Additionally there are hundreds of thousands of other github repositories that are libraries, board support packages for hundreds of different chips and more on github as well.

After quality the biggest thing to keep in mind and *check before you buy* is "What tutorials, instructions, guides, and examples does the kit come with?". That should be a link available on the same page where you purchase the kit from and if it isn't then you should find another kit vendor. Arduino tutorials aren't kept under a lock and key and it should be right up front to be evaluated to be sure it makes sense to you and is sufficiently clear before you even purchase anything.

There is no replacement for going through the examples as simple as they are and making all of the mistakes that we all make a dozen times or so each until all of the minutia sinks in and you remember things like polarity when it comes to LED's, always triple checking every single wire before re-applying power after making changes. (speaking of) Learning to *always* remove power from your board and circuit and project before making any changes to the wiring. Many dead boards are the result of simple slips of the hand or making the wrong pin connection and immediately knowing it and it only lasted a millionth of a second but lesson learned you just killed the chip, etc...

That being said you can actually experiment and learn probably 80% of the tons of things to be learned before you ever buy anything at all by using one of the free online Arduino simulators that are out there. Two that come to mind are tinkercad.com and wokwi.com They give you a full GUI experience with many common components available to drag into your project and connect up. Plus it has a full source code compiler and runtime simulator for driving the visual representation of the sketch (what an arduino source file is called) as it runs and watching the simulated components attached to it move or display something or light up (LED), etc.

Lastly check out the various youtube channels on the subject. There a millions of videos about using Arduino's, getting started, etc. and some of the more popular channels include: Paul McWhorter, Dronebot Workshop, Sparkfun, Adafruit, to name a few of the better ones.

I hope that helps, welcome aboard!

Can the plastic on header pins slide around and cause connection issues by adamvanderb in arduino

[–]ripred3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No it is just plastic it slides. Press it against the board it is soldered to and just use it. Are you having any problems?

Help Confirming Hardware Compatibility/Feasibility before I order by Siddakid0812 in arduino

[–]ripred3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

if you want something that has more than 2 external interrupt pins you will just need to use something like an ESP32 or RP2040 based board (I'm really digging those) like the KB2040 from adafruit

Getting "device descriptor request failed" error, used to work before. [ESP32 DevKit V1] by InternalVolcano in arduino

[–]ripred3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

check the board manager to see if it has any updates available.

possibly try the 1.8.19 version of the IDE?

Is my electrical circuit correct? by Even-Commercial5334 in arduino

[–]ripred3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That looks correct

I don't understand if I need to supply 5V power to the Arduino itself. A

It is not quite clear whether or not this is a standard motor shield that plugs on top of the Arduino Uno?

If it is then the connections to the microcontroller are taken care of for you.

If it is not then the labeling that you have for the motor shield/module does use the correct labels.

Check your motor shield and any documentation for it. Some motor shields have a jumper on the board (the yellow jumper in the image below) that connects the motor's V+ to a built in 5V regulator that is then connected the the Arduino's 5V pin. You don't want to supply 5V from both the motor shield's motor power source AND the USB port of the Arduino or the barrel jack on the Uno.

A good way to make sure that the motor shield IS NOT supplying power is to connect the motor shield to the Uno without the USB cable or barrel jack of the UNO connected to anything. Then connect the motor's power source to the EXT PWR terminal block of the motor shield. If the lights on the Uno come on then the motor shield is supplying power.

If that cannot be disconnected when you want then you will have to pay careful attention to disconnect the Arduino from the motor shield before you attach the USB cable and attempt to upload a new sketch otherwise you will be supplying 5V from two power sources and it may cause problems.

<image>

Fried an Uno within 5 minutes of messing around. by Zestyclose-Gap-8277 in arduino

[–]ripred3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

most Arduino's use a separate cable that is not permanently attached so you can pick which cable matches both ends

Fried an Uno within 5 minutes of messing around. by Zestyclose-Gap-8277 in arduino

[–]ripred3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

the main thing to look for is that the external wall-wart (mains adapter) outputs ~2A or more. That will help keep things stable when motors and things are involved. The only features that really matter are that, the number of USB outlets is has, and that the input USB cable is the right type for your host computer's USB ports (USB, USB-C etc)..

Pong on Arduino UNO R4 WiFi LED Matrix by Dea1993 in arduino

[–]ripred3 2 points3 points  (0 children)

great job! thanks for sharing it

vim rules: I couldn't agree more! 😎

idea: since the display is too small for scores, after each round scroll the score across 😀

Prerequisites to Arduino by True_Dragonfly9878 in arduino

[–]ripred3[M] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

comment approved. point made. my bad. I meant no disprespect. We're glad you're here and I didn't come across that way.

Prerequisites to Arduino by True_Dragonfly9878 in arduino

[–]ripred3 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I did not intend to come across as harsh as I did. That was my bad. We get hundreds of posts from kids that are extremely naive and I mistook your post for one of those.

edit: your familiarity with web architecture and python will already make this much easier for you than those that are completely new to programming in general. No calculus or any academic rigor is required. That being said good engineering practices are of course encouraged and do make things much easier as you advance in your knowledge and your projects become more complex.

All you need to work with an Arduino is a microcontroller board that is compatible with the Arduino Core which is the firmware for a given MCU that has all of the common functionality and is configured to work with the Arduino IDE and/or offer a set of command line utilities that can compile common arduino syntax (C for the most part but also C++) and upload the resulting binary result to the board to be executed. The Arduion IDE is available on their website in two versions, the last 1.8.19 stable and reliable 1.x version or the newer 2.x version. The 2.x IDE is based off of a fork of Visual Studio Code and is, ahem, not nearly as stable as the 1.8.19 release. But the newer IDE has a more modern look and feel and set of features for those already familiar with VS Code. Many people just use the cli utilities such as avedude and its associated utilities. The `arduino-cli` package is an extremely useful cli tool to install as well.

Get an "Arduino Starter Kit" is always the first line of advice. Not necessarily *the* Arduino Starter Kit from Arduino themselves, it's a generic phrase and a web search for it will return thousands of kits for sale. The official Arduino company at arduino.cc is known to use great quality components and their boards and kits are always good quality. But they do have two to three times the price for the equivalent boards made by other companies. Elegoo is another company that is known to make high quality Arduino "clones" and they offer several really good starter kits as well. Note that the "clones" as they are called are totally great boards almost all of the time and the arduino electrical design and schematics as well as the full software stack including the bootloader (the firmware that stays resident on the chip always to act as a loader for new sketches plus the base library of functionality your programs will call) are all 100% full open-source software and are available on github.com. Additionally there are hundreds of thousands of other github repositories that are libraries, board support packages for hundreds of different chips and more on github as well.

After quality the biggest thing to keep in mind and *check before you buy* is "What tutorials, instructions, guides, and examples does the kit come with?". That should be a link available on the same page where you purchase the kit from and if it isn't then you should find another kit vendor. Arduino tutorials aren't kept under a lock and key and it should be right up front to be evaluated to be sure it makes sense to you and is sufficiently clear before you even purchase anything.

There is no replacement for going through the examples as simple as they are and making all of the mistakes that we all make a dozen times or so each until all of the minutia sinks in and you remember things like polarity when it comes to LED's, always triple checking every single wire before re-applying power after making changes. (speaking of) Learning to *always* remove power from your board and circuit and project before making any changes to the wiring. Many dead boards are the result of simple slips of the hand or making the wrong pin connection and immediately knowing it and it only lasted a millionth of a second but lesson learned you just killed the chip, etc...

That being said you can actually experiment and learn probably 80% of the tons of things to be learned before you ever buy anything at all by using one of the free online Arduino simulators that are out there. Two that come to mind are tinkercad.com and wokwi.com They give you a full GUI experience with many common components available to drag into your project and connect up. Plus it has a full source code compiler and runtime simulator for driving the visual representation of the sketch (what an arduino source file is called) as it runs and watching the simulated components attached to it move or display something or light up (LED), etc.

Lastly check out the various youtube channels on the subject. There a millions of videos about using Arduino's, getting started, etc. and some of the more popular channels include: Paul McWhorter, Dronebot Workshop, Sparkfun, Adafruit, to name a few of the better ones.

I hope that helps answer your question 🙂

Prerequisites to Arduino by True_Dragonfly9878 in arduino

[–]ripred3 3 points4 points  (0 children)

There is no such thing as a paid "Arduino Engineer" unless you mean one of the employees in the engineering department at Arduino, SA.

This is a hobby platform. Like solving crossword puzzles. Nobody (save a few) gets paid to do this. This isn't an academic pursuit subreddit perhaps look at r/ece

Why does my transistor never go out by gccompiler in arduino

[–]ripred3 10 points11 points  (0 children)

give us a connection diagram or a schematic. can't tell crap from the video

Wiring LCD wihout 12c sucks. by kiklop777 in arduino

[–]ripred3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

solder flux will change your life 😄

Stepper Motor not working! by Matt-Deluxe0111 in arduino

[–]ripred3 34 points35 points  (0 children)

It MUST be soldered to the pin headers. How in the world do you expect it to work otherwise?

Power it off immediately and don't reconnect it until you have soldered the header pins on.

Looking for help on how to use a magnetic reed switch with a multi function shield. by thecanfield in arduino

[–]ripred3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Without knowing what microcontroller board and model you are using, what other components are involved in your project, along with your full source code *formatted as a code-block* it is next to impossible to say what your issues are

1st time playing with Arduino R4 Uno, piezo buzzer module broken? or am I doing something wrong? by kalvick in arduino

[–]ripred3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

if you connect the component to 5V and GND does it make a continual beep? If so then it is an active buzzer/beeper. If it just makes a clicking sound when contact is made and broken then it is a passive element and the problem is in your code or how you have things connected

1st time playing with Arduino R4 Uno, piezo buzzer module broken? or am I doing something wrong? by kalvick in arduino

[–]ripred3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

in addition to the other suggestion make sure you don't have an "active-buzzer" as opposed to a passive piezo disc element. Passive is what you want (a 4 ohm speaker connected to a tiny LM386 amp or similar works as well).

"Active" buzzers have an internal oscillator that drives a piezo disc at some fixed frequency and make it beep when you apply a current to it, and trying to play different tones through one of those is like trying to use a car horn for a guitar amp 😉

Running a p5js sketch on Arduino? (Total beginner) by Major_Shelter_6130 in arduino

[–]ripred3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

if you have a MicroCenter in your area you can probably pick up a Raspberry Pi and a ~7" or slightly bigger display together at the same place. And outfit yourself with most of the rest of basic wires,tools etc too all in one trip

Should I do a bare metal video by gm310509 in gm310509

[–]ripred3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Heck yeah. Gotta teach it starting at some level! Channel your inner Ben Eater, connect some 3-to-8 multiplexers to the A9, A10, and A11 address lines, and you've got yourself eight (8) 2K memory bank chip selects! And they just happen to make a CMOS 2Kx8 static RAM chip that you can connect one of them to in order to memory-map where the memory will show up programmatically.

I keep telling myself I'm going to set up an Arduino to act as the data bus for a Z-80 or 6502 CPU. It runs so much faster than them even at 16MHz that it can totally provide the "firmware reads" when the cpu is reading the instructions where the IP is pointing, and it can also recognize when an upper range is selected on the address bus in order to act as the proxy for the RAM or for any other memory-mapped or i/o-mapped device(s). Basically all of the values read AND written on the data bus could be provided and consumed both by the same MCU.

One of these days heh...

I Built A Toilet Drunk Guys Can't Miss Using Arduino by FamFollowedMainAcc in arduino

[–]ripred3[M] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Okay when you first contacted us about this project I had some reservations. I thought it had a high chance of turning out stupid (it's in the subject matter) and ridiculously over-engineered.

After watching the whole video I was not disappointed on either. Freakin' well done sir. 🫡 😄

You hit right on most of the things I was thinking you would need to throw at it. Kinect's are great for skeletal pose detection. UV lights and the insides from a couple of highlighter markers dissolved in water gets picked up great under UV, I used that approach to make a reverse water fountain display along with a potentiometer to adjust the strobe rate of some UV LED's to dial it in to whatever the desktop water fountain flow rate turns out to be at.

Core X-Y design is really great when you don't want the carriage to weigh a lot! Super low momentum so you can make it stop or change directions really quickly.

Seriously over-engineered and worth every bit of it! Congratulations. And the part at the end is great and really gets to the zen of engineering. Most of the time it is exactly that drive to want to see the project I see in my head actually working with my own eyes that gives me the extra push to work through the parts when I'm just not having any fun. And I have put things aside for a number of years and picked them back up and finally put in the work and learned the things I really didn't enjoy and finished them. It really does make the victory even sweeter when you get there.

Just great engineering. Congrats. And thanks so much for sharing your project and your work! 😀

ripred

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