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Arduino in the size of a AA battery
- dougmany 11y agoThis is great. I have used one LiFePO4 batteries (3.2 V) and a copper rod to replace two 1.5v batteries in a few electronic. This would be even better then a copper rod.
- exhilaration 11y agoInteresting battery. Can you tell me what kind of charger you need for it?
- dougmany 11y agoSearch for "lifepo4 14500" It does need a specific charger. I bought my charger from batteryspace.com. I found the following linked from their site. Charging Non-cobalt-blended Li-ion While the traditional lithium-ion has a nominal cell voltage of 3.60V, Li-phosphate (LiFePO) makes an exception with a nominal cell voltage of 3.20V and charging to 3.65V. Relatively new is the Li-titanate (LTO) with a nominal cell voltage of 2.40V and charging to 2.85V. (See BU-205: Types of Lithium-ion.) Chargers for these non-cobalt-based Li-ions are not compatible with regular 3.60-volt Li-ion. Provision must be made to identify the systems and provide the correct voltage charging. A 3.60-volt lithium battery in a charger designed for Li-phosphate would not receive sufficient charge; a Li-phosphate in a regular charger would cause overcharge.
- asimuvPR 11y agoEdit Here is the blog post from the person who created it: http://johan.kanflo.com/the-aaduino/ http://johan.kanflo.com/the-aaduino/ Github repo (Its MIT licensed): https://github.com/kanflo/aaduino https://github.com/kanflo/aaduino -- What I really liked about this approach is that it makes packaging the "Arduino" inside a common battery holder very easy. Maybe one or two holes are needed to connect sensors and you have a pretty nifty enclosed "Arduino". What we now need is someone to build a battery enclosure with exposed poins. Anyone from Adafruit, Tindie, etc. here? :)
- striking 11y agoIt's neat how many pins are available, too. TX/RX (for serial), the SPI pins, an IRQ, and pins 8-10, 12, 16. This would be a great way to prototype a simple wearable project that doesn't use wireless radios.
- asimuvPR 11y agoOr to connect to a raspberry pi through serial.
- munro 11y agoAt first I wasn't impressed, because Arduinos are all bloat, an AVR can run directly off a battery. Then I realized they've found a clever way to use reuse a battery holder as an enclosure!
- Zekio 11y agoThat guy had a genius idea, bet many people are gonna use this for wearable projects in the future. Kinda wish I was better at stuff like this, maybe I should begin playing around with my Arduino again.
- pedalpete 11y agoGreat form-factor to easily re-use existing battery enclosure, but I have been wondering lately about the long-term future of arduino. With the low price of something like the Pi Zero which is running a full version of linux, or something like the Esp8266 which can run many different languages, you're basically paying shipping costs. What benefit does arduino have in this future, other than a large existing network, which I understand can't be overlooked as a strength.
- simcop2387 11y agoPi Zero will never directly replace something like the arduino. Running linux (or any OS) can be a huge liability when you need to talk to some other bit of hardware that has strict timing requirements. That said, things like the ESP8266 and Arm Cortex M* processors are definitely becoming far more attractive than the AVRs in the lower end Arduino products (Due and others are also using ARM).
- mschuster91 11y ago> Running linux (or any OS) can be a huge liability when you need to talk to some other bit of hardware that has strict timing requirements. Not just the timing is critical, also the failure causes (and modes) are far bigger in number when running an OS. E.g. if you properly code in C or ASM for a microcontroller and avoid things like recursion, it's very hard to crash due to OOM errors.
- marcosdumay 11y agoTo be fair, a 8MHz (16MHz?) CPU is also a huge liability when you have strict timing requirements. For almost anything, the Pi will probably give you better guarantees by sheer speed... and you can always compile the kernel with a real-time patch. Not saying running on the bare metal is worthless, but an Arduino is a really low end board.
- joshvm 11y agoI think that's confusing liability with speed. Running interrupt-free code on an ARM or AVR is incredibly reliable. I would argue much more reliable than going to the length of patching the kernel. Just because it's slow doesn't mean you can't predict what's going to happen, they're two separate issues.
- megablast 11y agoWhat I want is one with included Bluetooth LE so that it can easily talk to smartphones.
- mschuster91 11y agoFuck BTLE. It's a nightmare to work with. Complex, extremely sparsely documented, and the Linux bluetooth stack is a PITA - not to mention that the BTLE part of BlueZ is ENTIRELY undocumented and you have to be really lucky to catch a bluez dev on IRC. I wonder how all the cheap-ass Android device makers get BT(LE) running... or wait, often they don't and the user is screwed...
- asimuvPR 11y agoI understand the anger, but could you provide more information? Thanks! :)
- tdicola 11y agoGo to www.bluez.org and try to figure out how to use BLE. Like how to scan for BLE devices, connect to one and read its GATT, interact with characteristics, etc. Bonus points try to figure out how to do it using their APIs and not command line tools. Good luck! (here's a hint, I hope you like dbus)
- asimuvPR 11y agoZeus! You are right. I'm going to try and get in touch with them to see if we could collaborate and improve documentation.
- tmuir 11y agoI do embedded development, and BLE is just another stack. It's actually very well documented in the official Bluetooth Core Specification. It's thousands of pages long, but it's a big stack with lots of layers and protocol. Just like any networking stack, there's a decent learning curve, but its not like it requires any fundamental tool foreign to firmware development. On the other hand, your average arduino tinkerer has been handed so much abstraction of low level details, learning BLE, at least on the device side, would be a tall task. Specific implementations of stacks and sdks will obviously vary in quality and documentation. On the device side, Nordic does a very good job with tools and documentation for their parts. There are several companies that make modules with nordic parts and provide libraries and example projects. I've also used noble, which is a node js module that allows you discover and connect to devices. On a Mac, all you need is Xcode.
- tlrobinson 11y agoThe reverse would be neat too, an Arduino which is also a AA battery holder.
- asimuvPR 11y agoLike the basic stamp 2 education board does with a 9v battery
- onlycommenting 11y agoThe most expensive part for that was the serial-to-usb cord I had to buy. Great little tool and taught me a lot.
- asimuvPR 11y agoDefinitely. I used to build my own cables back in the early 2000s and barely broke even due to radio shacks pricing. Currently have a Boe bot laying around somewhere in the lab. Might have to dust it off.
- Gratsby 11y agoWhen you're going beyond hobby basics, doesn't it make sense to shift over to atmel or any other long established vendors? I appreciate what arduino has done, but at some point it's too much.
- icebraining 11y agoThe Arduino is an Atmel chip on a small board with a few components for simplifying the power supply and USB communication, plus an IDE and a few libraries for simplifying the development. There's nothing "basic" about the hardware itself: you can at any time switch to C and compile with gcc, just like for any Atmel chip.
- ubercow 11y agoWhen I'm doing my hobby projects, I'll often prototype on an Arduino UNO with breadboard. Then in "production" I'll buy a stock ATMega328 and a couple supporting components and build it right onto my perfboard. Great guide here on how to do that. https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ArduinoToBreadboard https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ArduinoToBreadboard If you want even more control, you can just use the avr C libraries with any atmega328, Arduino included.
- tmuir 11y agoThe microcontroller on most arduinos is a normal atmel microcontroller. The build output of the arduino compiler is no different from traditional embedded compilers. It's still just machine instructions. It's sort of similar to how Python runs on top of C. To the processor, it's all the same. It had no idea that you wrote your application in C or Python. They both end up as machine instructions.
- dang 11y agoHow about we link to that instead of http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/19/aaduino/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=FaceBook&sr_share=facebook http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/19/aaduino/?ncid=rss&utm_sourc.... Edit: well that didn't work. URL changed back from http://johan.kanflo.com/the-aaduino/ http://johan.kanflo.com/the-aaduino/. (We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11538219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11538219 and marked it well off-topic.)
- cryptoz 11y agoWell, > Error establishing a database connection
- dang 11y agoAw, that sucks. I'm never sure quite what to do in this situation. It depends on what the author would want.
- jffry 11y agoBlog got hugged to death. Here is a mirror: http://archive.is/34sQu http://archive.is/34sQu
- rectang 11y agoIt's frustrating that the name is a riff on Arduino rather than Genuino. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino#Trademark_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino#Trademark_dispute I guess this serves as a cautionary tale, illustrating the power of a well-known brand and what happens when you lose control of it.
- software_radio 11y agoYet another reason to use RaspberryPi and Netduino.
- tmuir 11y agoArduino has become a generic term referring to anything that can be programmed by the arduino ide. It happens to be the largest development community in the world for 8 bit microcontrollers. It only makes sense that people who want to give their projects maximum visibility would use arduino, and not genuino. The top comments in threads about genuino would just be people talking about the name dispute, not the actual project.
- larkinrichards 11y agoThis seems to be a great way to stick a small wifi-tracking device (skyhook based, report location whenever it finds open wifi network) in any AA powered device. You'd have to figure out how to put a 1.5v battery on the board so the overall voltage of the battery pack would be correct.
- mmanfrin 11y agoDo you (or does anyone) know how much power something like that would use? I've been wanting to make a tiny tracking device (using 2G instead of Wifi), but I didn't pay very good attention in my high school physics class, so I don't know if a tiny cell chip + tiny gps chip could last long without power. I've looked in to little tumble generators (I don't know the actual term, something that could generate power off of movement) but again, my knowledge is lacking in that department. Would make for neat little animal tracking devices, if they could generate power from movement, store in a battery, and then 'pulse' out on a regular interval (whatever interval is allowed by the generation from the shake/tumble generator).
- tzs 11y agoThe GPS tracking collars researchers use on wolves last something like a year or even two. Their batteries are more powerful than a couple AA's, of course, but that should at least give a starting point for some back of the envelope estimates as to what you could do with a smaller power budget. A lot depends on how often you actually need to gather GPS data, and how often you need to report it. A GPS can use a relatively large amount of power while first getting a fix, but then updating that fix later, if it hasn't moved too far, will use a lot less power. The datasheet for a GPS module should tell you the power consumption during various operations, and how long those operations can take, so you can figure out the power needs for a given updating schedule. You could probably do some clever things, like include an acceleration sensor and only update the GPS when you infer from the acceleration sensor that you've moved. Similar considerations apply to reporting data. Frequent reporting will use more power than saving up the data and sending it one bigger batch, because there is overhead in setting up a connection to whatever you are reporting to. There are commercially available GPS trackers that run for two weeks on two AA alkaline batteries or three weeks on AA lithium batteries. I don't think the ones I saw reported wirelessly...they were the kind you have to retrieve to get the tracking log, but this suggests that an AA GPS tracker with wireless reporting with enough runtime to be quite useful is feasible for a lot of applications.
- sandworm101 11y agoLol. It's a great idea, but I would hate to go through airport security with that board tucked into a battery holder. The entire package just screams "secondary inspection".
- geerlingguy 11y agoI carried my Raspberry Pi cluster (www.pidramble.com) through the airport four times. All but one time I had to do a slight bit of extra explanation that the hardware and mini rack that held it all together was just a computer. People aren't used to seeing exposed circuit boards anymore.
- sandworm101 11y agoI have the same issue with my ubertooth.
- ryanmarsh 11y ago> The AAduino I read that with a Boston accent
- ilaksh 11y agoIsn't the Arduino Pro Mini smaller? And its been out for ages.
- Yaggo 11y agoThere exists many smaller, less-known Arduino-compatible designs, e.g. TinyDuino, FemtoDuino, MicroDuino, BareDuino Nano (roughly 20x15 mm).
- gregsadetsky 11y agoThere used to be a comment thread here regarding the Pi Zero and how it's impossible to buy one through any of the distributors. Somebody (else?) provided a link regarding Broadcom, and how they might not want the Pi Zero to become a success... Everything seems to have disappeared. What happened?
- j_s 11y agoThis thread is still here; is it what you mean? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11538507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11538507
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mattewdev 11y ago<scscript><h1>TEST XSS</h1></script>
- mattewdev 11y agoGood news!
- e0m 11y agoTo me this is an indication of how far behind energy storage technology is.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoWell, that depends if you put that board facing the front or the back of your battery holder... ;).
- ordbajsare 11y agoAs an EE I'm not impressed.
- huula 11y agoAn atmega328p, how big should it be LOL
- paddi91 11y agoFor everyone who is interested in buying one, https://aisler.net/kanflo/aaduino/aaduino-v2 https://aisler.net/kanflo/aaduino/aaduino-v2
- svckr 11y agoI don't understand what the author is trying to say with "wiring it in backwards" in the last paragraph. Well, of course you power it with the batteries right next to it; otherwise, what would be the point? From what I can gather from the original blog post, linked by asimuvPR, there's just one way to put it in and you'll probably fry some components if swapping polarity. Am I missing something, or is this just your average TC article?
- MaulingMonkey 11y ago> I don't understand what the author is trying to say with "wiring it in backwards" in the last paragraph. The author is just marveling at this novel / nonobvious form factor, and referencing this bit as elegant / cool / new: > The + and – markings on the PCB indicates (this is important, read carefully) the positive and negative poles of the battery we are pretending the AAduino is. [...] Also note! If you want to power the AAduino from a bench power supply, connect the power supply’s black negative lead to the + marking and the red positive lead to the – marking. Typically your electronics have polarity labelings based on which end of the battery they'd connect to - e.g. you'd have a red wire going from the positive terminal of the battery to the positive terminal of the device being powered, which this paragraph is warning is not correct for the AAduino because it's labeled as a battery would be instead.
- ZenoArrow 11y agoI like the idea of the form factor as it makes it easy to source a compact case. If it wasn't the case, but rather the compactness, that was particularly useful then it's worth pointing out that smaller Arduino-compatible boards exist. For example... http://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/2013/07/05/smallest-arduino-compatible-board/ http://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/2013/07/05/smallest-arduino-...
- 2III7 11y ago18650 form factor would be even better. Better battery life and more room for stuff on the Arduino PCB.
- Zekio 11y agoThis would indeed be a much better form factor, especially if it could be made a two part module. So you can swap out one part to interchange between BLE or Wifi.
- BjornW 11y agoFor those interested, Kanflo wasn't the first to create an Arduino like clone in this form factor. For instance there is the the Jeenode and its sibblings developed by Jean-Claude Wippler. See for more info on this: http://www.digitalsmarties.net/products/JeeNode http://www.digitalsmarties.net/products/JeeNode
- anotheryou 11y agoThe JeeNode is way bigger than an AA (with the upper pins bent outwards nearly double the size). I recently bought teensys (or teensies?) to get smaller (a little to wide for AA slots though): https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/teensyLC.html https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/teensyLC.html Given the cost you might want to try to sand of one side of connectors to make it fit :)
- aalhour 11y agoIs there any guide/introduction to the hardware architecture of Arduino in layman terms and how it was built? I am really interested in studying this aspect of Arduino since I finished the first half of nand2tetris a couple of weeks ago.
- eggy 11y agoMore von Neumann-propagating propaganda! Just kidding, I just embarked on nand2tetris this week. Great stuff! However, I feel have betrayed my Lisp Machine lust in the process. I was reading Peter Kogge's 1992 book, "The Architecture of Symbolic Computers" (fantastic book, Lisp, or not), and hoping to implement my own LM in simple hardware, no Symbolics machine here ;) I have Pilos (PicoLisp on bare metal) running in a VM on my Windows 8 box[1], and I am about to buy a chip that was made especially for running miniPicoLisp [2,3]. All that being said, I am looking into the Propeller chip, the 8x32bit core chip from Parallax. They released the Verilog files a few years back for the hardware, and the software (Propeller Assembler, and Spin, a Python-like programming language for it) years before that [4]. I'd like to see if I can use it somehow. I like the non-von-Neumann architecture of it. Interrupts are not needed in the same sense. Also, each 'cog' (1 of the 8x32bit cores on the Propeller) can modify the main code, thereby allowing for self-modifying code on the microcontroller. That and Lisp's 'code as data' should make for a helluva an adaptable system. [1] http://picolisp.com/wiki/?PilOS [2] http://www.futurlec.com/ET-STM32_Stamp.shtml [3] https://github.com/simplemachines-italy/hempl [4] https://www.parallax.com/microcontrollers/propeller-1-open-source
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]