Hey guys,

I just got my Arduino board recently. I'm a coder at heart so I'm really used to the MS Visual Studio 2005 work flow. Does anyone know how I can set up Visual Studio to use the AVR compiler? The compiler is somewhere in the IDE's program directory so which exe it is specifically and how its command line works would be great. Also some information on how to use avrdude manually to upload the binary as a post-build step? Thanks a lot!

Hey guys, just wondering if there's a way I can do serial communication without using the RX and TX pins. If not maybe I can do it manually on other pins or is that more pain than it's worth?

Hey guys, I was wondering if it's possible/easy to expand the program storage space for an Arduino. 14 kB is nice for small projects but insufficient for larger, more complex projects. Ideally it would be a separate integrated circuit that could interface to the microcontroller, but from what I know generally the whole program should be loaded up in its entirety in the "RAM equivalent" so the ATmega168 might be fundamentally limited to the 14 kB there. If this is true then I'm looking to use multiple microcontrollers to create my program in a set of black boxes running parallel to each other OR grabbing a bigger and better microcontroller and having to learn how to program it without the Arduino board. Any suggestions?

Thanks! That's everything I was hoping to know!

Why does it have to be done with a hardware programmer? Where can I get a hardware programmer? Can I make one myself? Can it be done through the USB cable? I don't have a serial or parallel connection on my laptop. Thanks for the answers to my endless questions!

Hey guys, I got myself a fresh ATmega168 stand alone, and I'm wondering what steps I need to take to get it to work with my Arduino. From what I can garner I need to burn the bootloader on to it? Can I do this through the Arduino IDE? Any pitfalls I should watch out for? Anything else I need to do other than burn the bootloader? Thanks and merry Christmas!

Hey guys,

I'm working on an autonomous UAV, and I'm trying to select a good data radio modem. The expected range at the competition is probably about 1 mile line-of-sight. Including a margin I'm guessing I want something with about a 1.5 mile range. I'm looking for something with a really simple RX-TX interface for serial communication. Also, since it's going into a small plane I'm looking for light weight and low power consumption characteristics. Obviously reliability would be nice so low bit rate errors and whatnot. I've found a hand full but I don't know if there are any makes out there that are particularly well suited and such. Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks!

In regards to mopowered's problem, I checked the decimal value of those characters you were getting and it looks like they're all off by 128. Try something like a

if( val > 128 )
  return val-128;
else
  return val;

It's hacky but it's a quick check to see if you can get good characters from it. I remember running into a problem with chars and bytes before in regards to this 128 offset.

Okay, so I found what's different, http://www.arduino.cc/en/Hacking/OtherHardware

Can someone explain how they're different though? Will delayMicroseconds simply be off by a multiplier? How does analogRead behave differently? If I have to recompile the bootloader does that mean I have to get a programmer?

Hey guys, I just wanted to know if I loaded a program onto the ATmega168 and then put it standalone on a breadboard with a 20 MHz crystal, will I run into timing issues? In other words, will delayMicroseconds(100) still delay for exactly 100 microseconds?

Well, if you sample the signal from the guitar fast enough you should come up with the wave form. I don't know what the frequency of the guitar is but I think human hearing range is up to about 22 kHz. In that case you need to sample at least 44 kHz fast which is possible with the 16 MHz ATmega168 chip. So what you could do is save the last sample. Then get the current sample and subtract the last sample from the current sample to find the delta. Err, also save the last delta. If you notice the "delta" change signs then you know that the sinusoidal wave has just passed a peak or trough? If that's the case then you can take the sample there as the amplitude of the wave. However, this assumes a sinusoidal wave which I'm guessing might not be the case. See if you can just log the data and plot it to see what the wave looks like. If you're crazy enough you could run a discrete FFT... just an idea. Or if anything you could just keep a running max or min of the samples in the past 100 samples or something and use that as your amplitude. Bah, I just realized that the Arduino can't really pick up the negative voltages since the ADC goes from 0V to 5V. Well, you could still do a similar analysis I think.

I just wanted to add a resource to this thread. This looked like a great Q&A on the subject: http://www.embeddedrelated.com/usenet/embedded/show/74184-1.php

I'm kind of curious why a multiplexer won't work with serial communication. I haven't dealt with them before but to me it looks like whatever port is activated the in and out to that port acts like a simple wire. If that's the case then shouldn't serial communication go through? It makes syncing a pain but possibly with a buffer, query interface with port labels on messages it can be done? Of course the big question is, if it doesn't work with a multiplexer, then how can you do serial connection to multiple components with the single UART that the ATmega168 has?

I'm curious when it comes to using the multiplexer. What happens when I have incoming serial information from something like a GPS module but I'm not switched to that pin. The UART has a buffer to just collect it until you read it (I think) but I'm guessing the multiplexer doesn't have anything of that sort? If that's the case, would I maybe have to set up a microcontroller on the other end that acts as a buffer until the right pin is selected and the receiving microcontroller requests data from the buffer microcontroller? Is there a better solution?

Hey guys,

I listed my sources over at my blog: http://auav.blogspot.com/

I posted the code I'm using online here: http://www.jmaginary.com/wiiNunchuck.cpp.txt

Hope that helps out!

Viet Nguyen (Jonathan)
jnguyen327@gmail.com