Embedded Computing Design

A little over a year ago I ordered my first printed circuit board (PCB) from OSHPark, which contained an ATtiny85, along with resistors and a few blinking LEDs. Since then I’ve designed several more boards, and fairly recently I made the switch to surface mount components.

As outlined in this November 2020 article, I recently switched from a PC to a Macintosh. Overall, I’m quite happy with the move, in a large part because it feels like they do all the “little” things right.

As you probably know, Raspberry Pi single-board computers, especially Pi 4 models, can get quite hot. While passive cooling options are often good enough to avoid overheating and thermal throttling, at some point you’ll need to think about using a cooling fan. The Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins don’t supply enough current to power even a small fan, but there are several ways to power and control a fan with the Pi.

Some time in the early 1990s, my parents got “their” first computer, a 386 SX by a company called “USA Flex.” This device had 640KB of memory, and a “turbo” button to go from 8 MHz to 16 MHz–a relief if that kind of blazing top speed was too intimidating–and came with Windows 3.

While it’s still a bit cold to ride a bicycle right now over much of the United States (and the Northern Hemisphere in general), here in Florida, it’s a great time to get outdoors. The only small problem is that as the sun sets fairly early until daylight savings time starts. It’s therefore quite possible then that you might end up being out beyond sunset, and in that case it’s a good idea to have a light to keep yourself visible to others.

In a previous article, I outlined how to connect to your Raspberry Pi via SSH, and noted how you can assign a Static IP address to allow you to consistently find it.

One might say that Arduino boards have been critical to today’s freedom of electronic experimentation, allowing normal people to make all manner of custom devices.

About 3 months ago I got a new laser cutting and engraving machine.

As a result of the current pandemic, more people than ever have been working from home. While there are definite drawbacks. As someone who has worked from home for years, I’d argue the positives far outweigh the negatives. Regardless of what happens in the future, I suspect that working from home will be, if not the "new normal," at least much more common.

In this post, I’ll go over a few tricks for setting up your user interface, as well as how you can automate things to potentially take yourself out of the loop completely!

Setting up and running your own Raspberry Pi home automation system is both fun and useful, and lets you have control of your devices without depending on “the cloud.”

While a Raspberry Pi is the central hub of this home automation system, It of course needs devices that work with it.

After setting up my father’s 386 SX–complete with a “turbo” button that let it perform at 16 MHz–many years ago, I’ve stuck with IBM/Microsoft, with the exception of a few forays into Linux.

Home automation, and the Internet of Things, has been the technology of the near future for what seems like well over a decade now.

Whether you need high strength, ease-of-printing, or the ability to slide your part back and forth after linking, there are a wide variety of techniques available to finish off your print.

In this post, we'll go over several options for adding fasteners, like nuts and inserts to your 3D design.

The reality is that once you go through the process one time, if you follow the right steps the next installation is just a few clicks away.

When making something awesome, it's a good bet that you want the whole world to know about it. If you'd like people to appreciate just how interesting your device is, you'll need to take good photos.

As it just so happens, the Raspberry Pi doesn't come with any sort of active or even passive, cooling solution, and it's common to simply hook up a fan to run at all times to its 5V power supply.

Getting started with Raspberry Pi single-board computers (SBCs) generally means installing the Raspberry Pi OS, and interfacing with its Windows-like graphical user environment.