One of the major limitations to I2C is the inherent address conflicts when you try to bus multiple sensors of the same type/family together. While all sensors have a default address, some give an option for a secondary, and fewer give tertiary addresses or beyond. Since most systems only have one I2C bus, you are limited in how many of those sensors are used.
The 9548 family of modules solves this problem: they are multiplexer.
(more…)Sparkfun has made life much easier when working with 7-segment displays. To do so, they made their own PCB which has an Atmel 328P on the back and a 4-digit 7-segment display on the front.
(more…)Node Red is an application built upon NodeJS which supports interfacing the GPIO pins of a Raspberry Pi via a webpage GUI.
It does not require that Apache or PHP be pre-installed, it can also run concurrently with Apache and PHP if they are.
Measuring voltages is a common task in electronics and is accomplished using Analog to Digital Converters. Some microcontrollers and Single-Board computers have them built in, but some do not.
(more…)Shift Registers are a specific type of semiconductor which use bitwise control to toggle outputs. In doing so, a number of outputs can be controlled with minimal wires or programming.
For the examples this document, we’ll be focusing on the Texas Instruments 6b595, which has been replaced by the 6b596 and 6b598-Q1. They all function the same, but the manufacturing architecture and packages have been updated.
One of the most common hurdles to running a Raspberry Pi headless is having a way to shut it down gracefully.
Fortunately, there is a little-known built-in toolkit for doing exactly that.
As the Raspberry Pi and Atmel/Cortex/ESP platforms become more powerful computational processors, they require more power to do so. Powering these devices in Automotive 12V or Industrial 24V applications has become its own challenge.
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