There’s just something about wielding a laser pointer on a dark, foggy night. Watching the beam cut through the mist is fun – makes you feel a little Jedi-esque. If you can’t get enough of lasers and mist, you might want to check out this DIY “laser sky” effect projector.

The laser sky effect will probably remind you of other sci-fi movies – think of the “egg scene” from Alien. The effect is achieved by sweeping a laser beam in a plane through swirling smoke or mist. The laser highlights a cross section of the otherwise hidden air currents and makes for some trippy displays. The working principle of [Chris Guichet]’s projector is simplicity itself – an octagonal mirror spun by an old brushless fan motor and a laser pointer. But after a quick proof of concept build, he added the extras that took this from prototype to product. The little laser pointer was replaced with a 200mW laser module, the hexagonal mirror mount and case were 3D printed, and the mirrors were painstakingly aligned so the laser sweeps out a plane. An Arduino was added to control the motor and provide safety interlocks to make sure the laser fires only when the mirror is up to speed. The effect of the deep ruby red laser cutting through smoke is mesmerizing.

If laser sky is a little too one-dimensional for you, expand into two dimensions with this vector laser projector, and if monochrome isn’t your thing try an RGB vector projector.

I have a good background working with high voltage, which for me means over 10,000 volts, but I have many gaps when it comes to the lower voltage realm in which RC control boards and H-bridges live. When working on my first real robot, a BB-8 droid, I stumbled when designing a board to convert varying polarities from an RC receiver board into positive voltages only for an Arduino.

Today’s question is, how do you convert a negative voltage into a positive one?

In the end I came up with something that works, but I’m sure there’s a more elegant solution, and perhaps an obvious one to those more skilled in this low voltage realm. What follows is my journey to come up with this board. What I have works, but it still nibbles at my brain and I’d love to see the Hackaday community’s skill and experience applied to this simple yet perplexing design challenge.

The Problem

I have an RC receiver that I’ve taken from a toy truck. When it was in the truck, it controlled two DC motors: one for driving backwards and forwards, and the other for steering left and right. That means the motors are told to rotate either clockwise or counterclockwise as needed. To make a DC motor rotate in one direction you connect the two wires one way, and to make it rotate in the other direction you reverse the two wires, or you reverse the polarity. None of the output wires are common inside the RC receiver, something I discovered the hard way as you’ll see below.

I wasn’t using the RC receiver with the toy truck. I extracted it from the truck and was using it to control my BB-8 droid. My BB-8 droid has two motors configured as what in the BB-8 builders world is called a hamster drive, though is more widely known as a tank drive or differential drive (see the illustrations). Rotate both wheels in the same direction with respect to the droid and the droid moves in that direction. Reverse both wheels and it drives in the opposite direction. Make the wheels rotate in opposite directions and it turns on the spot.

The motors in my BB-8 are drill motors and are controlled by two H-bridge boards. An Arduino does pulse width modulation to the H-bridge boards for speed control, and controls which direction the motors should turn. Finally, the RC receiver is what tells the Arduino what to do. But a converter board, the subject of this article, is needed between the RC receiver and the Arduino. Note that the Arduino is necessary also for countering when the BB-8 droid wobbles and for synchronizing sounds with the movement, but those aren’t addressed here.

Since there are two motors and two directions for each motor, the RC receiver needs to control four pins on the Arduino to make the two drill motors behave as follows: motor 1/clockwise, motor 1/counterclockwise, motor 2/clockwise, motor 2/counterclockwise. And whatever voltages the receiver puts on those pins has to be relative to the Ardunio’s ground.

And herein lies the problem. The Arduino expects positive voltages with respect to its ground on all those pins. So I needed a way to map the RC receiver’s two sets of motor control wires, which can have either positive or negative voltages across them, to the Arduino pins which only want positive voltages. And remember, none of those RC receiver wires are common inside the receiver.

My Fumbling First Approach

Now, keep in mind, electronics is a general interest of mine and except for what we were taught in high school physics class, I’m self-taught. That means I’ve “read ahead” but much of my knowledge has been determined by what projects I’ve done. So I have gaps in my knowledge. I’d never turned negative voltages into positive before. It sounded simple enough. Searching online didn’t help though. The closest I got was in two old posts in forums where the answers were “It’s easy to do. I can do it with a single resistor.” But there was no further explanation and I didn’t ask my own question anywhere at that point.

Instead I came up with my own approach with just one set of wires from the RC receiver first. The wires coming from the receiver were blue and brown and could have either polarity depending on which way the receiver is being told to rotate the motor: clockwise or counterclockwise. That meant I needed two diodes to create two possible paths for the different polarities the brown wire could be: positive or negative. I then added a battery for the one path that was negative, to turn it into a positive.

Next, I put a PNP transistor between the positive of the battery and the receiver. With no signal from the RC transmitter, the transistor’s base is negative with respect to the emitter, but not enough to turn the transistor on. That’s because the battery’s negative is connected to the receiver’s blue wire and since there’s no signal from the transmitter, the brown wire is also at the same potential as the blue wire, and with battery negative.

The idea was that when the transmitter sent a signal to make that brown wire negative with respect to the blue wire, it would become even more negative and turn on the PNP transistor. A positive signal would then go from the battery, through the transistor to the Arduino.

The most obvious problem was that the Arduino wanted to see 3 volts to register as a HIGH input, meaning the battery would have to be at least 3 volts and so even with no signal from the transmitter, that would be -3 volts to the transistor, turning it on when it wasn’t supposed to be on.

Using A Relay Instead

And so I immediately thought of using a relay instead. I’d use the current running through the negative path to energize the relay, closing a switch that was completely independent of the RC receiver. The Arduino has a 5V output pin, so I made that switch close a circuit between the 5V pin and the Arduino’s pin 7, giving pin 7 the needed positive voltage.

The 1 in the circle in the schematic shows where I wanted to put a resistor in order to limit the current going through the relay’s coil. However, I tried with resistors all the way down to 4.7 ohms but the coil didn’t have enough current to close the switch. With no resistor, it worked and the current was 70mA. The relay’s coil was rated for 3V/120mA so I left it.

Using a relay did seem very heavy-handed, but it was the only solution I could come up with and I already had the relay in stock.

The next step was to add a second relay, doing the same for the second set of wires coming from the RC receiver for the second motor.

No Common In The Receiver

But the behavior was seemingly sporadic. And keep in mind that there was a whole dual H-bridge circuit that was also connected to the Arduino’s ground. I’d worked with relays a lot before, and the RC receiver came from a commercially made and functional toy so I had no reason to suspect that. On the other hand, I’d made the H-bridge circuit from scratch since I already had most of the parts, and I was new to H-bridges and MOSFETs. So at first I spent a good two weeks of spare time thinking my problem was with the H-bridge and drill motor side. I’m sure we’ve all experienced the same blindness, thinking the most likely culprit is the part you had a hand in.

But at some point I disconnected the H-bridge and tested just the RC receiver circuit, watching the voltages at the Arduino pins while I remotely turned on both “motors” in both directions in all combinations (no motors were connected at the time though). The only odd behavior I saw was when I turned the motors on in opposite directions.

Notice in the schematic that I’d connected together both blue wires coming from the RC receiver. Up to that point I’d been assuming that the blue wires were common inside the receiver and that it was only the brown wires that switched from positive to negative with respect to the blue wires. From the behavior I was seeing it looked like both wires were switching polarity, possibly around some other internal common reference.

So I added a third relay on one of the positive paths of one of the sets of wires. That meant the corresponding blue wire no longer needed to be grounded, keeping both of the receiver’s blue wires separate. Note that I didn’t bother putting in a fourth relay for the remaining positive path, and it turned out to not be necessary. At that point the circuits worked great and continue to do so.

The Ask

And so I ask, is there a better way to convert the RC receiver output to something the Arduino can use? Relays require power, so it would be nice if there was a solution that didn’t require any extra power. My relay solution seems very early 1900s. Or maybe it’s a good solution after all, but just one of many. Let us know in the comments below.

Before the Arduino took over the hobby market (well, at least the 8-bit segment of it), most hackers used PIC processors. They were cheap, easy to program, had a good toolchain, and were at the heart of the Basic Stamp, which was the gateway drug for many microcontroller developers.

[AXR AMR] has been working with the Pinguino, an Arduino processor based on a PIC (granted, an 18F PIC, although you can also use a 32-bit device, too). He shows you how to build a compatible circuit on a breadboard with about a dozen parts. The PIC has built-in USB. Once you flash the right bootloader, you don’t need anything other than a USB cable to program. You can see a video of this below.

You will need a programmer to get the initial bootloader, but there’s plenty of cheap options for that. The IDE is available for Windows, Linux, and the Mac. Of course, you might wonder why you would use a PIC device instead of the more traditional Arduino devices. The answer is: it depends. Every chip has its own set of plusses and minuses from power consumption to I/O devices, to availability and price. These chips might suit you, and they might not. That’s your call.  Of course, the difference between Microchip and Atmel has gotten less lately, too.

We’ve covered Pinguino before with a dedicated board. If you never played with a Basic Stamp, you might enjoy learning more about it. If you’re looking for more power than a PIC 18F can handle, you might consider the Fubarino, a PIC32 board you can use with the Arduino IDE.

[Ryan Bates] loves arcade games, any arcade games. Which is why you can find claw machines, coin pushers, video games, and more on his website.

We’ve covered his work before with his Venduino project. We also really enjoyed his 3D printed arcade joystick based off the design of a commercial variant. His coin pushing machine could help some us finally live our dream of getting a big win out of the most insidious gambling machine at arcades meant for children.

Speaking of frustrating gambling machines for children, he also built his own claw machine. Nothing like enabling test mode and winning a fluffy teddy bear or an Arduino!

It’s quite a large site and there’s good content hidden in nooks and crannys, so explore. He also sells kits, but it’s well balanced against a lot of open source files if you’d like to do it yourself. If you’re wondering how he gets it all done, his energy drink review might provide a clue.

We’ve been waiting for this one. A worm was written for the Internet-connected Arduino Yun that gets in through a memory corruption exploit in the ATmega32u4 that’s used as the serial bridge. The paper (as PDF) is a bit technical, but if you’re interested, it’s a great read.

The crux of the hack is getting the AVR to run out of RAM, which more than a few of us have done accidentally from time to time. Here, the hackers write more and more data into memory until they end up writing into the heap, where data that’s used to control the program lives. Writing a worm for the AVR isn’t as easy as it was in the 1990’s on PCs, because a lot of the code that you’d like to run is in flash, and thus immutable. However, if you know where enough functions are located in flash, you can just use what’s there. These kind of return-oriented programming (ROP) tricks were enough for the researchers to write a worm.

In the end, the worm is persistent, can spread from Yun to Yun, and can do most everything that you’d love/hate a worm to do. In security, we all know that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and here the attack isn’t against the OpenWRT Linux system running on the big chip, but rather against the small AVR chip playing a support role. Because the AVR is completely trusted by the Linux system, once you’ve got that, you’ve won.

Will this amount to anything in practice? Probably not. There are tons of systems out there with much more easily accessed vulnerabilities: hard-coded passwords and poor encryption protocols. Attacking all the Yuns in the world wouldn’t be worth one’s time. It’s a very cool proof of concept, and in our opinion, that’s even better.

Thanks [Dave] for the great tip!

[domiflichi] is human and fallible. So he can’t be blamed for occasionally forgetting the laundry in one of the machines and coming back to a less than stellar result. However, while fallible, he is not powerless.

What if his washer/dryer could email or text him about his laundry? It seemed simple enough. Add a vibration sensor to the side of the machine along with some brains. When the load is done it will bother him until he comes down to push the button or There Will Come Soft Rains.

He started off with an Arduino-and-ESP8226 combination and piezo sensors. The piezos had lots of shortcomings, so he switched to accelerometers and things worked much better. We really like the way he mounts them to the side of the washer dryer using the PCB’s mounting screws as angle brackets. The case is a standard project box with some snazzy orange acrylic on the front.

It took some fiddling, but these days [domiflichi]’s clothes are fresher, his cats fed, and his appliances more aware. Video of it in operation after the break.

A conventional compass points north (well, to magnetic north, anyway). [Videoschmideo]  wanted to make a compass that pointed somewhere specific. In particular, the compass — a wedding gift — was to point to a park where the newlywed couple got engaged. Like waking up in a fresh new Minecraft world, this is their spawn point and now they can always find their way back from the wilderness.

The device uses an Arduino, a GPS module, a compass, and a servo motor. Being a wedding gift, it also needs to meet certain aesthetic sensibilities. The device is in an attractive wooden box and uses stylish brass gears. The gears allow the servo motor to turn more than 360 degrees (and the software limits the rotation to 360 degrees). You can see a video of the device in operation, below.

The compass module may be hard to find, but you should be able to modify it to work with more readily available boards. Since you may not be able to find the exact gears used, your build will probably be a little different anyway.

The brass and wood are decidedly steampunk looking. It reminded us of this GPS project. If you have too much street cred to buy an off-the-shelf GPS, you could always roll your own.

Making a clock with a common microcontroller like an Arduino isn’t very difficult. However, if you’ve tried it, you probably discovered that keeping track of wall time is difficult without some external hardware. [Barzok] has a very minimal clock build. It takes a handful of LED arrays with an integrated driver, an Arduino Nano, a real-time clock module, and a voltage regulator.

The software uses a custom 6×9 font and handles addressing the LEDs as one single display. Because the real time clock module is so accurate, there’s no provision for setting the time. [Barzok] says that twice a year he just hooks the Arduino up and reflashes the program with a new start time and that seems to be sufficient.

It wouldn’t be too hard, though, to add a few buttons to allow for setting the time or accepting other user input. Then again, this is a minimal build. It would be a good starter project for someone looking to get into building microcontroller projects.

If you want really minimal, you could go with a 4 LED clock (but you better know the resistor color code). Of course, an ESP8266 can serve as a simple clock and it gets set via NTP which is even better.

The 1970s called and they want their rotary dial cell phone back.

Looking for all the world like something assembled from the Radio Shack parts department – remember when Radio Shack sold parts? – [Mr_Volt]’s build is a celebration of the look and feel of a hobbyist build from way back when. Looking a little like a homebrew DynaTAC 8000X, the brushed aluminum and 3D-printed ABS case sports an unusual front panel feature – a working rotary dial. Smaller than even the Trimline phone’s rotating finger stop dial and best operated with a stylus, the dial translates rotary action to DTMF tones for the Feather FONA board inside. Far from a one-trick pony, the phone sports memory dialing, SMS messaging, and even an FM receiver. But most impressive and mysterious is the dial mechanism, visible through a window in the wood-grain back. Did [Mr_Volt] fabricate those gears and the governor? We’d love to hear the backstory on that.

This isn’t the first rotary cell phone hybrid we’ve featured, of course. There was this GSM addition to an old rotary phone and this cell phone that lets you slam the receiver down. But for our money a rotary dial cell phone built from the ground up wins the retro cool prize of the bunch.

[via r/Arduino]

In case you missed it, the big news is that a minimal Arduino core is up and working on the ESP32. There’s still lots left to do, but the core functionality — GPIO, UART, SPI, I2C, and WiFi — are all up and ready to be tested out. Installing the library is as easy as checking out the code from GitHub into your Arduino install, so that’s exactly what I did.

I then spent a couple days playing around with it. It’s a work in progress, but it’s getting to the point of being useful, and the codebase itself contains some hidden gems. Come on along and take a sneak peek.

The Core

An Arduino isn’t worth very much unless it can talk to the outside world, and making the familiar Arduino commands work with the ESP32’s peripheral hardware is the job of the core firmware. As of this writing, GPIO, WiFi, SPI and I2C were ready to test out. GPIO means basically digitalWrite() and digitalRead() and there’s not much to say — they work. WiFi is very similar to the ESP8266 version, and aside from getting the ESP32 onto our home WiFi network, I didn’t push it hard yet. When other libraries come online that use WiFi, I’ll give it a second look.

SPI

The SPI routines in the ESP32 Arduino port both work just fine. I tested it out by connecting a 25LC256 SPI EEPROM to the chip. The ESP’s extremely flexible hardware peripheral routing matrix allows it to assign the SPI functions to any pins, but the Arduino implementation is preset to a default pinout, so you just need to look it up, and hook up MOSI to MOSI and so on. As of now, it only uses one of the ESP32’s two free SPI units.

With SPI, some of the weirdness of using Arduino on a powerful chip like the ESP32 start to poke through. To set the speed of the SPI peripheral, you can use the familiar SPI_CLOCK_DIV_XX macros, only they’re scaled up to match the ESP32’s faster CPU clock speed. The end result is that SPI_CLOCK_DIV_16 gives you a 1 MHz SPI bus on either the 16 MHz Uno or the 240 MHz ESP32, which is probably what you want for compatibility with old code. But 240 divided by 16 is not 1. In retrospect, the macros would be better defined in terms of the desired frequency rather than the division factor, but you can’t go back in time.

There were also two extra definitions that I had to add to the program to make it run, but they’ve both been streamlined into the mainline in the last eighteen hours. That’s the deal with quickly evolving, openly developed software. One day you write that the macro MSBFIRST isn’t defined, and before you can go to press, it’s defined right there in Arduino.h. Great stuff!

I2C: The Wire

The I2C (“Wire”) library has also gotten the ESP32 treatment, and worked just as it should with an LM75 temperature sensor. This is my standard I2C test device, because it lets you read a few registers by default, but you can also send the sensor a few configuration options and read them back out. It’s not a particularly demanding device, but when it works you know the basics are working. And it did.

The ESP’s dedicated I2C pins are on GPIO 21 and 22 for data and clock respectively. Some I2C implementations will use the microcontroller’s pullup resistors to pull the I2C bus lines high, so I tested that out by pulling the 10 KOhm resistors out. The ESP stopped getting data back instantly, so that answers that. Don’t forget your pullup resistors on the I2C lines and all is well. Otherwise, it’s just connecting up two wires, double-checking the I2C device address, and reading in the data. That was easy.

External Libraries

More than half of the reason to use Arduino is the wide range of external, add-on libraries that make interfacing with all sorts of hardware easy and painless. Many of these libraries are built strictly on top of the Arduino core, and should “just work”. Of course, when you’re actually coding this close to the hardware, nothing is going to be as portable as it is a few layers of abstraction higher up on your desktop computer. Let’s go test this hypothesis out.

El Cheapo IL9341 TFT Display

Since the SPI library works out of the box, the other various libraries that depend on it should as well, right? Well, kinda. I wasted an afternoon, and still failed. Why? I have a cheapo ILI9341 screen that only works with an old TFTLCD library, rather than with the nice Adafruit_ILI9341 libs. The former is so full of AVR-specific voodoo that it completely fails to compile, and is probably easier to re-write from scratch for the ESP32 than make work in its present form. The Adafruit library compiles fine, because it only depends on the SPI library, but it doesn’t work with my lousy screen.

Going repeatedly back and forth between these two libraries, my LCD experiment ended in tears and frustration: I couldn’t make either of them work. I scoped out the SPI data on a logic analyser, and it looked good, but it wasn’t drawing on the screen. At this point, a full line-by-line protocol analysis would have been needed, and that’s a few days worth of work. If I just wanted a running ILI9341 driver, I would go grab [Sprite_tm]’s NES emulator demo and use the one there, but it’s not Arduinified yet, so it’s out of bounds for the scope of this article.

DHT22 Humidity and Temperature Sensor

Seeking a quick-and-dirty success, and beaten down by hours of hacking away for naught, I pulled a DHT22 sensor out of the eBay bin, and cloned Adafruit’s DHT library. Of course it didn’t compile straight out of the box, but there were only a couple of things that were wrong, and both turned out to be easily fixable.

ESP32’s Arduino didn’t have a microsecondsToClockCycles() function yet so I commented it out, multiplied by 240 MHz, and left a hard-coded constant in my code. This value was just used for a timeout anyway, so I wasn’t too worried. There are also some timing-critical code sections during which the Adafruit code uses an InterruptLock() function to globally enable and disable interrupts, but these functions weren’t yet implemented, so I just commented it all out and crossed my fingers.

After reassigning the data pin to one of the ESP32’s free ones (GPIO 27, FWIW), it compiled, uploaded, and ran just fine. I now know exactly how hot and humid it is up here in my office, but moreover have had a quick success with an Arduino external library, and my faith is restored.

Lessons from the Libraries

I suspect that these two examples are going to be representative of the ESP32-Arduino experience for a little while. Oddball hardware is going to take some time to get supported. Highly optimized libraries with cycle-correct timings or other microcontroller-architecture specific code in them will need to be ported over as well, despite being “Arduino” code. If you’re a code consumer, you’ll just have to wait while the wizards work their behind-the-scenes magic.

But there will also be a broad group of libraries that are written in a more-or-less device-independent way, and these should be easy enough to get working within fifteen minutes or so, as with the DHT sensor library. If you’re willing to compile, read the errors, and comment out or fix whatever shows up, some codebases will work in short order.

What’s Next? Turning Servos

Given that the Arduino-ESP32 port is brand new, indeed it’s still in progress, there is a lot of work for the community to do in getting it up to speed. Suppose that you need to drive a lot of servos, but the “Servo” library isn’t implemented yet. You’re an impatient coder. What to do? Get hacking!

The good news is that the Arduino-ESP32 libraries themselves are full of hints and examples for getting started. Open up the ESP32-specific directory that you cloned from GitHub. The usual *.cpp files provide the standard Arduino core functionality. The esp32-hal-xxx.h and esp32-hal-xxx.c files are chip-specific, and a tremendous help in taking advantage of the chip’s stranger options. For instance, esp32-hal-matrix.* gives you nice and easy access to the pin-routing matrix, which is a daunting task if you’re starting just from the datasheet.

But let’s get back to servos. The ESP32 chip has an intriguing hardware LED PWM peripheral that lets you assign up to sixteen channels to individual LEDS, specify the PWM frequency and bit-depth, and then control them by appropriately setting bits in hardware registers. If you think this would be hard to do by hand, you’d be right. The esp32-hal-ledc.* files provide helper functions to set up the hardware PWM generator, and with these libraries, getting a 16-bit LED fade in straight C or “Arduino” is easy. But our sights are set on servos.

To drive a hobby servo, one needs pulses between 1,000 and 2,000 microseconds each, repeated every twenty milliseconds or so. Setting the repetition rate to 50 Hz takes care of the first part, and each count is 20 ms / 65,635 ticks long, or roughly 0.3 microseconds. Setting the PWM width value to something between 3,300 and 6,500 generates pulses in the right ballpark, and my servo ran jitter-free (and a clean signal was confirmed on the oscilloscope). Here’s all it took:

#include "esp32-hal-ledc.h"
void setup() {
   ledcSetup(1, 50, 16); // channel 1, 50 Hz, 16-bit depth
   ledcAttachPin(22, 1);   // GPIO 22 on channel 1
}

void loop() {
   for (int i=3300 ; i < 6500 ; i=i+100){
    ledcWrite(1, i);       // sweep the servo
    delay(100);
   }
}

That wasn’t so hard, was it? It’s not “Arduino”-style — there’s no objects or classes or methods anywhere in sight — but thanks to a straightforward and well-written hardware abstraction layer, using the very complicated peripherals is made pretty simple. Kudos to [me-no-dev] for his work on the back-end here. The HAL inside the Arduino libraries is currently the best source of code examples on many of the chip’s more esoteric and interesting peripherals.

Conclusion?

The short version of my dive into Arduino-esp32 is that there’s a lot here, even though it’s not done yet. Blinking LEDs and other simple GPIO is a given, and the core communication libraries that are already implemented worked for me: GPIO, WiFi, SPI, and I2C are up and running.

Non-core libraries are hit and miss. I suspect that a lot of them will work with just a little bit of tweaking. Others, especially those that are architecture-dependent, may not be worth the effort to port and will need to be re-written. The ESP32 has a bunch of interesting and innovative hardware peripherals onboard and there’s certainly no Arduino libraries written for them yet, but there’s some great HAL code hidden away in the Arduino-ESP32 codebase that’ll give you a head start. We could get lost in there for hours. Time to get hacking!

The ESP32 is still a new chip, but orders should be coming in soon. Have one? Want to see us put other libraries or languages through their paces? Let us know in the comments.