Little things that go wrong...

Who has shorted the 5Vdc supply to GND on the Nano?

And now it does not even show the power LED, or it is on very dim?
You simply destroyed the MBR0520 diode, labeled D1 in the "+5V Auto Selector" circuit on the board.

How to fix?

Either order another replacement MBR0520LT1G, 0.5A, 20V, Schottky Diode, or promise yourself to never, ever short Vcc to GND again and solder a jumper in!

Diode labeled B2

Getting less expensive Arduinos from Ebay?

Well, a lot of times the USB connector is not soldered properly and you get intermittent power or data to the ATMEGA chip.

How to fix?

Touch all the pins up with a solder iron and flux.

Roll-up Doors with a State Machine

Roll-up a door please! (with a State Machine in code, part 1) MHO Junction’s Molson Brewery in a 3D Layout View ( all photos and drawings by Lloyd Henchey, Ontario, Canada) We all know we can open and close close something with an Arduino and a Servo, but what if we want to a little bit more operating fun with some lights and sounds, all after a manager gives approval to open or close the door to the beer brewery before your engine is allowed to pick up or deliver a car? Control Panel at the brewery Six doors under construction at the Molson brewery on the MHO Junction Engine pulls up to the red light, shift manager (operator) grants permission, door raises up with alarms and a flashing red light, door goes all the way up, light turns green , engine or car can proceed! Same flashing red light going down and maybe different door squeaking noises. All good articles start with a YouTube video: youtube.com/watch?v=-8EnpUgTqR4 ! This article will introduce you to a “Finite State Mac

Making things flash...yes LEDs!

So we have all seen the BLINK program, where we first configure the onboard LED to be an OUTPUT and then we turn the LED on, waste some time, turn the LED off and waste some time in the loop() function and then everything repeat again. So, that is really cool and 25 times faster using an Arduino, compared to 25 years ago where you had to erase the EPROM with a UV light first before you could upload the code that you tediously wrote in Assembler! And the 8051 did not have all the awesome built-in modules to simply do: Serial.begin( 300 ); // yes it was slow back then Serial.println( "Hello world" ); // and remember the extra work to do a String? // while \n and \r was needed too!!! Part I: So, back to the LED, the next question you ask is: "I have at least 17 more free pins , can they blink too?", and the answer is "Sure!". But in the current digitalWrite( 13, HIGH ); delay( 500 ); digitalWrite( 1

Pi Pico, we smell competition in the land of the RRRduino!

Pi Pico on an N-scale gondola Pi Pico, we smell competition in the land of the ‘duino! Our very favorite low cost microcontroller system is seeing some fresh competition. Everyone by now has heard about the Raspberry Pi, some fruity company in the United Kingdom, making single board computers! They run Raspbian (or other flavors of Linux and are capable of some Windows versions) for as little money as $10 for the Pi Zero W. The more popular Model 4, with 2 GB of RAM, retails for about $29. Add a $5 micro SD card and you have a real computer with which you can surf the internet, write code and even program Arduinos. It also runs our other favorite, JMRI. Of course, plug it into a small or big screen television with an HDMI cable and you can even stream Netflix. If you want a really cool computer built into a keyboard, also check out the brand new, Raspberry Pi 400 , you might just think you own a ZX Spectrum again. These are all “computers” with processors and now the Raspberry

Everything Model Railroad and RRRduino!

Search This Blog