Author Archives: Sudar

About Sudar

I am WordPress plugin developer and the original developer of Bulk Delete and Bulk Move WordPress plugins.

[Book Review] Arduino Android Blueprints

This is the review of the book Arduino Android Blueprints that I recently read. Before we get into the review please read the following disclaimer.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of the book by the publisher for me to review it. There was no condition that the review should be only positive and I didn’t receive any payment for the review. So I am just writing what I felt about the book after reading it.

Long time readers of my blog would know that I play around with connecting Arduino and Android a lot and have given talks about the pros and cons of the various approach that I have tried out.

So when someone from Packt Publishing contacted me about reviewing a book that talks about interfacing Android and Arduino I readily accepted it.

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Using Arduino and Raspberry Pi for Internet of Things

I gave a talk at Anna University today where I spoke about how to use Arduino and Raspberry Pi for Internet of Things.

Slides

I have uploaded the slides that I used for my talk to my slideshare account. You can download the slides or view them below. You can also checkout my other presentations and slides from my talks page.

Arduino Makefile v1.3.4 released

After about two months of active development, I am happy to announce the availability of v1.3.4 of Arduino Makefile.

New Features

The following are some of the new features in this release

  • Added support for compiling assembler code
  • List board name as well as tag in make show_boards
  • Support for Emacs Flymake
  • Support for building core objects in a subdirectory
  • Enhanced automatic detection of serial port
  • Enhanced and audited most of the regex used throughout the makefile

In addition to the above features there are a lot of bug fixes and tweaks that got in. You can checkout the release page to find information about all of them.

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Need your help in testing Arduino Makefile with Arduino 1.5.x

Arduino IDE branch 1.5.x has become more stable these days, even though it is still technically in beta. Support for all the new boards are getting added only to v1.5.x and that’s why we decided to start focusing on adding support for Arduino 1.5.x to the Arduino Makefile after the v1.3.3 release.

One of the major contributors to the project @sej7278 is currently working on it and has already created a WIP (Work In Progress) branch. It currently works for the basic boards and we are still working on adding full support for Arduino 1.5.x and we need help.

In particular we need help for the following

  • Testing the makefile with sam based boards
  • Testing the makefile with boards that occurs inside menus
  • Testing the makefile in Windows

If you can help us test one of the above, then kindly download @sej7278’s branch and document your findings in this github issue. Feel free to let me know if you have any questions or suggestions regarding this. I will also be posting updates about the progress in this blog as we progress along.

Arduino Makefile updates

It’s been a while since I announced the release of v1.1.0 of Arduino Makefile.

After that we have made 5 releases and have added lot of cool new features and the current version of the project is 1.3.3. In this post, I will try to mention most of the new features and bug fixes that we have made and going forward, I will try to write a separate blog post for each release.

New features

The following are some of the major new features that were added in between 1.1.0 and 1.3.3.

  • The difference between git checkout and package install is completely removed.
  • Arduino Makefile fully works with Windows (through cygwin)
  • All variables used in Arduino Makefile are documented now.
  • The perl script that was used for resetting Arduino boards is completely rewritten in Python now.

In addition to the above features there are lot of bug fixes and tweaks that got in. You can checkout the release page to find information about all of them.

Download

You can download the latest code from github and then follow the instructions to set it up.

The debian package arduino-mk is also updated to v1.3.3. So if you prefer to have a package, then you can install using apt-get or aptitude.

Special thanks to sej7278 for building the package and for Scott Howard for uploading it to Debian.

Contributors

These releases wouldn’t have been possible without the help from lot of contributors. In fact these days I am acting more of a maintainer than active contributor 🙂

Following is the list of contributors in no particular order.

Going forward

The major planned feature from now on is to add support for Arduino 1.5.x..

If you have any specific feature in mind, then do let us know about it in the issue tracker.

How Arduino helped me in different stages of my life

I gave a talk about how Arduino helped me in my different stages of my life in Arduino Day 2014 yesterday in Arduino India office. Arduino Day was celebrated in mark the 10th anniversary of Arduino.

Slides

I have uploaded the slides that I used for my talk to my slideshare account. You can download the slides or view them below. You can also checkout my other presentations and slides from my talks page.

Video

The video of the talk is also available in youtube.

Slides from my talk about using Raspberry Pi’s Serial port

Last weekend, I gave a talk about using Raspberry Pi’s Serial port in Computer Club’s (read hardware enthusiasts) monthly meetup.

Slides

I have uploaded the slides that I used for my talk to my slideshare account. You can download the slides or view them below. You can also checkout my other presentations and slides from my talks page.

Two ways of Raspberry Pi’s Serial port

In my talk, I covered the following ways by which you can use Raspberry Pi’s serial port.

  • To login via serial console
  • To communicate with other serial devices like Arduino

If there is enough interest, then I might write follow up articles explaining both the approaches in detail.

Arduino Makefile v1.1.0 released

After a couple of months of development, I am proud to annouce v1.1.0 of Arduino Makefile.

New Features

The following are some of the new features in this release

  • Support for ChipKIT 2013
  • Ability to set fuses without burning a bootloader
  • Ability to specify OPTIMIZATION_FLAGS based on target
  • Support for usbtiny and usbasp

In addition to the above features, there were also lot of bug fixes. You can see the complete list of changes in the release notes.

Download

You can download the latest code from github and then follow the instructions to set it up.

The debian package arduino-mk is also updated to v1.1.0. So if you prefer to have a package, then you can install using apt-get or aptitude. Package for Fedora and homebrew are coming soon.

Special thanks to sej7278 for building the package and for Scott Howard for uploading it to Debian.

Contributors

This release would not have been possible without the help from lot of contributors. Following is the list of contributors in no particular order.

You can also find more details about their contribution from the release notes.

What’s next

The following are some of the planned features for the future releases.

  • Package for Fedora
  • Package for homebrew
  • Arduino 1.5.x support

If you have any specific feature in mind, then do let us know about it in the issue tracker.

BTW, Happy New year everyone 🙂