Category: Arduino
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Salvaging a microSD card
Opening up a watertight box and finding this inside is never encouraging. The toxic soup trapped inside the box wasn’t doing any favors to the batteries or electronics, and the data logger was dead on arrival. But we pulled the microSD card to see if there was anything that could be salvaged off of it.…
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Waterproofing sensors for mussel monitoring
We have recently published two new papers in the Journal of Experimental Biology detailing the results of field experiments we carried out. Our goal was to monitor the behavior and internal temperatures of sea mussels (Mytilus californianus) on the shoreline, and link their recent experiences to their physiological status. There can be substantial variation in…
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A solar-powered tide clock using Arduino tide prediction libraries
Robert Werner has developed a solar-powered tide clock using my Arduino tide prediction libraries (GitHub link) I previously described here and here. The Instructables page shows how Robert used a servo motor to actuate a pair of hands on a dial face. The red and blue hands give you the time of the next high…
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Time lapse camera using ArduCAM
Design files and code for this project can be found here: https://github.com/millerlp/Time_lapse_arducam The goal of this project was to build a cheap and power-efficient time lapse camera to monitor some of my experiments in the field. The camera would capture an JPEG image every 30 seconds and write it to a micro SD card, and…
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Arduino compile error: the filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect
GetFileAttributesEx D:\Arduino\libraries\SdFat/SdInfo.h D:\Arduino\libraries\SdFat/SdSpi.h: The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect. The error message above started cropping up shortly after I upgraded to Arduino 1.6.8 on Windows 7 x64. The cause seems to be due to some folder becoming locked in the Arduino compile pathway. One solution seems to be to close the…
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Building a simple tide clock
Myself and Jeremy Long recently had a paper published in PeerJ (open access, free to read) describing the use of an Arduino microcontroller to predict tides and regulate the water levels in aquaria in synchrony with the natural tides. You can read more about that tide controller system here and further variations here. As part…
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Controlling tide height in lab aquaria
A few years back I posted about a set of Arduino libraries I wrote to allow an Arduino with an attached clock to predict the tides for a coastal site. In that post, I showed a variation on the theme that had a motor-driven rack that transited up and down in time with the tide.…
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PCB silkscreen sizes
Recently I’ve been getting my printed circuit boards manufactured through OSH Park, and they make good quality (to my eye) boards at a decent price, with less than a 2-week turnaround time. They also take files directly from Eagle software, rather than having to produce gerber files (though this is also an option). On a…
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Electronics parts list
Here’s the start of a list of common bits and doo-dads I use for building electronics projects. https://github.com/millerlp/parts_guide/blob/master/parts_guide.md That’s all there is to it.
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Open Wave Height Logger prototype in the water
I finally got around to deploying a prototype OWHL unit in the real live ocean to log some waves. The low-tech housing is made of 1.5″ schedule 40 pvc pipe. The pipe snugly fits the D-cell battery holder, while the electronics fit inside the modified 1.5″ end cap. I try not to rely solely on…