This is an external editor for the Arduino IDE. You will still use the Arduino IDE to select boards files, upload, and connect with the serial monitor. The only thing this does is makes it easier to write the code for Arduino.

My wife and I bought an advent calendar from Amazon. We decorated it. It did the trick. But, it wasn’t high tech enough. I had a goal to change that, and this is what I came up with. The whole thing is powered by an ESP8266 (D1 Mini) and…

Orange Pi has done it again. They have released a new board called the Orange Pi Zero. It is an amazing little quad core board with built on wifi and can be yours for $8.99 for the 512 mb of RAM model or $6.99 for the 256mb of RAM model.…
There are a lot of things I like about the Next Thing Co’s C.H.I.P. One is that the usb port works as a USB serial console. This is a little tutorial of how to setup the USB OTG g_serial console on all Allwinner H3 boards including the Orange Pi, Nano…

I live in Texas. Most of the year, we have no use for a fireplace as temperatures frequently get over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. However, I have always enjoyed having a fireplace going for ambiance. One day I was sitting in my living room and noticed that the fireplace was about…

When working with Arduino, there are many times where you want to do something after a set time. The best way to do this is to determine how long it has been since a set time using the millis() function. However, this poses a problem. Millis returns the number of…

There are many cases where I really wanted a way to have WIFI over the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi instead of having to use a USB dongle. This is a method to use a cheap and common ESP8266 module to get full GPIO wifi for ALL versions of…

One of the things I use my Raspberry Pis for the most is setting up a “Kiosk”. What I like to do is make a website, either on the web or hosted on the pi itself, and show that website full screen on boot. This is a fun little project…

It is possible to setup a circuit that automatically resets and programs the ESP8266 with Arduino. This is a little tricky due to how the ESP8266 is programmed conflicting with the way that the Arduino serial port works. On the official documentation for and Arduino ESP8266 project, they present the…

As of the time of this writing, the version of Node JS that comes with Raspbian is v 0.10.29. It has some bugs and is an old version considering the latest stable version is v6.x.x and the latest LTS version is v4.4.4 LTS (as of the time of this writing).…