MightyOhm

The Amp Hour #43 — Audacious Arduino Arguments

Our first four-way podcast!  Listen to me, Chris, Dave, and Jeremy chat about Arduino, high altitude balloons, hackerspaces in universities, the Google ADK, and the Maker Faire Bay Area.

Kudos to Skype for enabling us to actually pull this off!

Thanks to John, of the ATX Hackerspace, who loaned me his Arduino for testing, the HV Rescue Shield now works with the Arduino Mega.

I had to create new byte read/write functions for digital lines 0-7 because they are implemented very “differently” (and I don’t mean that in a good way) in the hardware for the Mega.  If you’re interested in how I did this, check out the new version 2.12 Arduino sketch and the new mega_data_read and mega_data_write functions.

To use the HV Rescue Shield with the Arduino, first download the revised sketch here.  Set the MEGA #define to 1 and compile/upload the sketch to your board.  Make sure you have the Arduino Mega selected in the Arduino Board menu, or the sketch won’t compile.

The Mega has more pin headers than the Rescue Shield, so be sure to install the shield all the way to the left, as shown here:

If you experience any problems with the HV Rescue Shield and the Arduino Mega, please report them in the support forum.

Version 2.0 of the HV Rescue Shield (I decided to drop the ‘AVR’ from the name) will add support for high voltage serial programming (HVSP) and 8-pin parts like the ATtiny13A.

Boards are due back next week, components are on order, but there is still code to write.

Back to work!

That’s a closeup of resistor R1 on my new Arduino Uno board.  See how the left terminal isn’t touching the solder bump on the land pad?  That’s not good.

Surprisingly, my Arduino seems to work just fine with one side of the resistor open.  Arduino, don’t let the cost reduction guys see this one, or they’ll eliminate it in the next rev!

More photos of the tombstoned resistor on my Arduino Uno.

The Arduino team has responded to other claims of manufacturing defects (most of which seem fairly trivial) in their blog post “One bad Arduino doesn’t spoil the barrel“. I have already contacted my reseller and will do everything possible to help Arduino improve their manufacturing process and quality control.