With frozen thawed pinky mice creeping into my budget & two other animals coming my way, I’ve decided to breed mice instead of buying frozen mice to lower expenditures. Per the usual, most aspects of their care such as heating, ventilation, & their feeding schedule will be automated using a microcontroller I will program. Being a beginner, what will I need to start this mice breeding project?
Blog Posts
New ATMega FTDI/ Unit Updates
Check Out Our Other Arduino Based Posts![/su_button]After a lot of inspecting, making, remaking my ATMega units, I’ve come to the conclusion that the issue isn’t with my ability to make them, but the FTDI programmer I’m using. I used to use this one, but as its description says, its not a genuine FTDI, so my computer likely bricked it. I bought a second one to ensure I didn’t just get a bad unit, but the replacement even stopped working. Perhaps there’s a variable I’m unaware of, but to be on the safe side I bought a genuine FTDI programmer & received it today with stunning success. Its capable of plug & play, & can program with 3.3v as well as 5v.
There are some gripes I have with the unit, one of which being that you need a M/F USB cord as the FTDI has a male connector instead of the usual female. Its weird, but is a small issue compared to how useful it is. A working FTDI means I can take the next step in my programming ventures by having a plug & play programmer to program my ATMegas. The picture below shows what I mean. I dislike having to make the pin connections, so for this ancient ATMega setup I used wires & make header pins to make it for me. A modern iteration of this setup is in the works for future use, but with major changes. Here are the public highlights:
Making Your Own Arduino
Making the stand alone arduino is a great way to learn more about the µcontroller (microcontroller) that powers the official Arduino µcontroller as its the brains that controls all the inputs & outputs, data processing, etc. of the controller. While using an official Arduino (the capitalized ‘a’) or clone is useful, the experience isn’t the same as building, programming, & completing your own. An official Arduino costs $22, a clone costs $10, which is cheaper, but doesn’t compare to the $4 expense needed to assemble your own. An added benefit is that the chip is an easy $2 replacement if you happen to burn it out, which will happen often as you start your arduino journey.
Programming The ATTiny84
The ATTiny84 is a smaller µcontroller I purchased as a replacement for the ATMega328-pu circuit, a favored but unnecessary circuit to have for simple applications. After a bit of online research & hearing the tutorials from many different YouTubers & outdated websites, I’ve decided to make my own guide to tell you how I assembled my ATTiny84 µcontroller.
Required Items:
ATTiny84 10µF Capacitor 10KΩ Resistor Single Color LED Elegoo Uno Chip Socket
Creating The 139 Pin Arduino
In this post I spoke about using the MCP23017 to increase your digital GPIO ports from 11 to 27, which was remarkable in and of itself, but pales in comparison to what I’ve recently found. Instead of a simple 27 GPIO’s, how about we increase it to a hefty 139 arduino ports? All we must do is make a few changes to the previous code used in the Adding Arduino Digital/ Analog Ports post from before.
Required Items: