Category Archives: Arduino

Unipolar, Bipolar, and Stepper Drivers: A Quick Guide To Stepper Motors

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One of the biggest hurdles I had with stepper motors was the differences with them. On the one hand, some motors seemed to need little more than a transistor to run (such as the ULN2003 Darington IC I used with this motor. On the other hand, sometimes the complexity is higher (like the part count on Ladyada’s motor driver board). So why the confusion? In a nutshell, there are two major kinds of stepper motors, and they need radically different … Continue reading →

My New Uno – A Ruggeduino

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I’ve been using my Arduino for about a year now – a Duemilanove – and I’d been eying the new Unos for a project. However, they are almost the same – so why upgrade? I found a reason: safety. Check out this post on what can happen with a regular Arduino if anything goes wrong. It explains that although the Arduino is great to work with, it lacks a few areas of protection – areas that clumsy ‘ol me felt … Continue reading →

Arduino Strings Are BIG!

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Interesting test: I was wondering if you could avoid the automatic string copy to RAM by putting strings inside a subroutine:   Run it, and you’ll get a memory display of RAM before, during, and after the subroutine call, something like this: 1840 inside function: 1834 1840 But uncomment the line and run again – likely, you’ll get something more like this: 1806 inside function: 1800 1806 What happened? In the first one, the compiler optimized the text string right … Continue reading →