Tero's Arduino Blog

Some AVR devices, like attiny85 (on Adafruit Trinket, for example), do not have hardware UART. However, it would be still nice to have serial output from them.

I wrote a simple Soft_Serial package, which can use any GPIO pin as TX UART pin.

package Soft_Serial is
   Serial_Pin …

Inspired by my earlier delay experiments and its followup discussion on AVR-Ada mailinglist, I decided to put my delay functions in good use.

Neopixel RGB LEDs require exact timing and people usually use AVR assembler code to get the timing right. However, I wanted to see can I do it …

AVR-Ada provides basically two ways to delay the code execution.

One way is busy looping using Generic_Busy_Wait_Seconds and Generic_Wait_USecs procedures from the AVR.Wait package.

procedure My_Wait is new AVR.Wait.Generic_Busy_Wait_Seconds
  (Crystal_Hertz => 16_000_000);

procedure Wait_1000ms is …

This is little heads-up for people, in case someone else also hits the same problem.

When playing with Arduino Leonardo, I noticed that if I enable interrupts, the code seems to freeze.

After some debugging and Google search, I found out that USB is turned on by the boot loader …

I have made temperature sensor in the past, but now I added power saving features to the code.

The result was a device which lasts almost a month when it reports temperature once an hour over XBee and is powered by 1000mAh LiPo battery.

Instead of official Arduino, I used …