• Arduino,  Hardware

    Making my washing machine smarter – Part 2

    << Continuation of part 1

    Guts. Time to talk about guts. Electronics guts of course…

    Which microcontroller should we use for this project? The first requirement is it hast to have WiFi, since it will be the way its way of sending notifications to my phone. About number of general purpose input/outputs (GPIO), two would be enough (one for detecting the door lock state and another one for actuating the cycle start button remotely). I could use a classic Arduino UNO, with a WiFi shield:

    This one is known by most makers out there. It supports thousands of libraries, which you can make tons of things with, but… It has like 20 pins between digital and analog, and even though the WiFi shield uses some of them, I still think it’s overkill for my project. Two pins would be enough.

  • Arduino,  Hardware

    A pinch of hardware – Makerbuino

    I would like to tell you about a different videogame console that is a bit different from the others. Why different? Does it have an even faster processor? Even more RAM? Can you play Crysis on it? No … It has an ATmega328 as a processor (you probably have heard about that chip, it is the one that comes with Arduino), 2KB of RAM and a screen… Full HD? 4K? Umm no… A black and white LCD with a resolution of 84 x 48 pixels. Yes, exactly, like the good old Nokia 3310.

    Ah, but I haven’t told you the best … It doesn’t come assembled, and that’s exactly what made me buy it. Assemble your own console that you can then play on? Interesting, right? 🙂

    Based on Gamebuino, another similar console project (although this one does come assembled, it is not necessary to dust off the soldering iron… Booring), this console promises to have fun both when assembling it, when playing and even when coding games for it (yes, it is Arduino after all. You have all the freedom to create games, applications and everything you can think of (even some hardware hacks, since it has a couple of I2C expansion ports)).

    The project itself is not new. It dates from the beginning of 2017, and was quite successful on Kickstarter, its launch platform. They are still selling copies from their website , so you still can get one. Why not?

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