MakerGram

salmanfaris

Maker Perspective

For Beginners/ Aspiring Makers Arduino UNO is my recommendation, very straight forward and very easy to get started.

Tech Specifications

Powerd by ATmega328P
14 Digital I/O Pin, which 6 provide PWM output
6 Analog Input Pins
16 MHz Clock
32 KB (ATmega328P) Flash Memory
2 KB SRAM
1KB EEPROM

The Arduino Uno is an open-source microcontroller board based on the Microchip ATmega328P microcontroller and developed by Arduino.cc. The board is equipped with sets of digital and analogue input/output pins that may be interfaced to various expansion boards and other circuits.

The main thing I loved Arduino is the community and peripherals That supported, also the Shields. these are boards that can be plugged on top of the Arduino PCB extending its capabilities. The different shields follow the same philosophy as the original toolkit: they are easy to mount and cheap to produce.

Another one is the IDE, The Arduino Integrated Development Environment is a cross-platform application that is written in functions from C and C++. It is used to write and upload programs to Arduino compatible boards, but also, with the help of 3rd party cores, other vendor development boards.

The Original Arduino Uno cost around $21, but you can also get clones even cheaper, but I recommend to buy original to support there mission and vision.

Website: https://www.arduino.cc/

There are some recommendations if you're into hackathons or quick prototype/POC.

ESP32/ESP8266

Others who have experience with the Arduino ecosystem, I suggest the Esperssif ESP8266 or ESP32 Low-cost WiFi and BLE* development platform, which is highly supported by the Arduino ecosystem. That means you can reuse many of the Arduino functions and libraries out of the box.

Particle Photon

The Photon is a $19 tiny Wi-Fi IoT device for creating connected projects and products for the Internet of Things. It's easy to use, it's powerful, and it's connected to the cloud. The board is powered by a Cypress Wi-Fi chip alongside a powerful STM32 ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller.

It's very easy to quickstart, also super easy to connect with particle cloud if you project involve Cloud and Connectivity.

Website: https://www.particle.io/

If you need more computing and processing power you can check the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBoard Single Board Computers

Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a series of small single-board computers developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation to promote the teaching of basic computer science in schools and in developing countries Since the aim is to teach kids about physical computing and computer science, the documentation and getting started is very straight forward and simple.

There are different models of Raspberry Pi SBC(Single Board Computer) and the latest one is Raspberry Pi 4 Model B which cost starts from $35. There is also lighter version called PiZero which cost around $5

Website: https://www.raspberrypi.org/

BeagleBoard

The BeagleBoard is a low-power open-source single-board computer produced by Texas Instruments in association with Digi-Key and Newark element14. The BeagleBoard was also designed with open source software development in mind and as a way of demonstrating the Texas Instrument's OMAP3530 system-on-a-chip.

If you are a beginner and want to get started the embedded Linux development, then you need to checkout beagleboard series single-board computer.

Website: https://beagleboard.org/

The list is not over yet, I'll share more thought on the thread as a followup.

salmanfaris

Sharing a tip that can be very useful when working with Raspberry pi GPIO, The GPIO Pinout is designed to be both a quick and interactive reference to the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins, plus a comprehensive guide to your Raspberry Pi's GPIO interfaces. It also includes dozens of pinouts for Raspberry Pi add-on boards, HATs and pHATs.

This Pinout.xyz gather useful information about the Raspberry Pi GPIO interface and add-on boards and invite board manufacturers to produce their own "overlay" files which describe which pins their Pi add-ons use. It's very handy when comes quick prototyping.

command

pinout

more details: https://pinout.xyz/

salmanfaris

Hi @ZeeZa ,

You need to build a custom board with the ESP32 SoC and the MPU6050 IMU, right?

first, you need to select appropriate ESP32 SoC from the wide variety of model, after that using the datasheet find out the minimum configuration circuit for the SoC and add the MPU6050 module. that's all you need. the most tricky part is the minimum configuration circuit.

salmanfaris

In this blog, we are going to learn to host web pages on GitHub for free using GitHub Pages!🤩 . we will host a very simple web page like https://0xsalfar.github.io/ from scratch to complex one.

You can read the blog from here: https://blog.makergram.com/part1-host-website-on-github-for-free/

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salmanfaris

Hi @Geethesh, If you are building simple POC (Proof of concept ) or Quick prototype then the HC-05 is enough with the ATtiny.

For the ATtiny45 minimum circuit you only need one Pull up resistor for Reset, and one Filter capacitor between VCC and ground and you also need to populate ICSP pins for programming
You also need only two external componts HC-05 and Buzzer .
In the this project we did't require any external oscillator , the internal 8mhz should be fine .

salmanfaris

Hi @kowshik1729 ,

Yes, you can do Multi Thread in Raspberry Pi using python and note that different threads do not actually execute at the same time: they merely appear to.

We can easily implement simple threads using threading module. I'll show you some example of how actually it works.

Example :
I was trying to blink two LED's at the same time, for that I created a function that does the blink infinitely using while(True) .

import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
import time

Rled = 12
Bled = 6

GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)

GPIO.setup(Rled,GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.setup(Bled,GPIO.OUT)


def blue():
        while True:
                print "LED BLUE is  ON"
                GPIO.output(Bled,GPIO.LOW)
                time.sleep(1)
                print "LED BLUE is  OFF"
                GPIO.output(Bled,GPIO.HIGH)
                time.sleep(1)
def red():
        while True:
                print "LED RED is  ON"
                GPIO.output(Rled,GPIO.LOW)
                time.sleep(1)
                print "LED RED is OFF"
                GPIO.output(Rled,GPIO.HIGH)
                time.sleep(1)

blue()
red()

Output :

Video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AypMEQFpEWo&feature=youtu.be

since we are using the infinity loop for both methods, the blue() will not stop and red() will not invoke either.

In these scenarios, we can use multithread both function without waiting for another , let's try.

import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
import time
import threading



Rled = 12
Bled = 6

GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)

GPIO.setup(Rled,GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.setup(Bled,GPIO.OUT)


def blue():
        while True:
                print "LED BLUE is  ON"
                GPIO.output(Bled,GPIO.LOW)
                time.sleep(1)
                print "LED BLUE is  OFF"
                GPIO.output(Bled,GPIO.HIGH)
                time.sleep(1)
def red():
        while True:
                print "LED RED is  ON"
                GPIO.output(Rled,GPIO.LOW)
                time.sleep(1)
                print "LED RED is OFF"
                GPIO.output(Rled,GPIO.HIGH)
                time.sleep(1)


t1 = threading.Thread(target=blue)
t2 = threading.Thread(target=red)


t1.start()
t2.start()

Output :

Video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMKYzgdNwd8&feature=youtu.be

with the help threading module we can simply run both methods at the same time (how we feel).

I think you got your answer. also, keep in mind to avoid race condition and deadlock while multithreading.

salmanfaris

Hi @Abhay ,

I don't know what exactly your application is or what you are going to do with the data is ? if you want to read vehicle data you can use OBD-II CAN-BUS development kit. also for the esp vs raspberry pi decision is also depends upon what you are doing with the data.

salmanfaris

Hi @SalmanFK ,

You can Serialize the data as a JSON or CSV string format and publish that as a single string, so you get the data in a single node, you also DeSerialize the string simply in the application end.

salmanfaris

Overview

One of the key concepts in electronics is the printed circuit board or PCB. It's so fundamental that people often forget to explain what a PCB is. This tutorial will breakdown what makes up a PCB and some of the common terms used in the PCB world.

Here we are using Sparkfun PCB Basic tutorials, and after that, we have some ToDO that you need to complete.

Resource Link: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/pcb-basics/all

ToDo:

Find the Annular ring, Drill hit, Finger, Mouse bites, Pad, Silkscreen, Slot on the PCB you used (ex: Arduino Uno, Relay) and Document it (Docs, Github, MakerGram..etc)
List out PCB designing Softwares
Download and Install Autodesk Eagle

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