Category Archives: Arduino

Custom Nintendo Switch-duino controller

I recently took up playing animal crossing to relax, and surprisingly it worked, normally games are not a healthy distraction from my studies, but this game genuinely does relax me, or it did. One of the major issues and great stresses of animal crossing is the lack of a “craft multiple items” feature when crafting items. Everything gets crafted 1 at a time, with an individual long animation between each instance, fortunately there is a “craft again” dialogue that pops up afterwards so you just have to mash the “A” button, but its annoying and time consuming, though if you seriously mash the “A” button repeatedly the animation speed doubles which is good.

Anyway, you might see this feature pop up in memes, people really wanted it added, it is good for making money (every day a random craftable item like furniture) becomes very valuable to sell, its quite useful early on in the game for making some capital, and later in the game making fish bait is still annoying to make to the extent many people dont even bother anymore. There are other games that run into similar problems, and im sure some people could find creative applications if they could run macros or repeaters, which has brought on my newest project.

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How to read 100% Humidity with a normal cheap digital hygrometer without ever breaking it

A problem people seem to have when reading humidity in greenhouses or grow rooms is that due to the nature of digital hygrometers, that they ALL are ceramic semiconductors that require direct exposure to the air they are measuring, hygrometers cant handle condensating humidity. Fancy ones like inkbird use special membranes or an internal heater so the readings are never true, but they are less likely to see the ceramic sensor get wet, because if it ever did, the sensor would destroy itself through electrolysis.

When growing mushrooms especially, the air gets humidified heavily using foggers, and people who use small or poorly operated systems might end up saturating the environment with fog for a while, in this case, sensor death is inevitable.

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Breakthrough on the MIDI synth

Ok, not quite. the wall i hit was i do not, or did not, at all understand how audio samples work, but now, i have learned what/how they are, how they can be passed to a super fast PWM drive or a DAC to produce audio (i have a nice audio-grade DAC so i may make the synth esp8266 or 32 based so you can add drum beats and other stuff via an app or web interface).

Now i know, and am currently learning how sample-tables work, as that is apparently important, if you want to output something more than just pure square wave. But thats just gravy and inconsequential, as it stands i know all i need to know to finish this thing, and shall, once i finish working on a newer, more important project with an immediate deadline, im making a WS2812B strip audio-reactive driver to drive a huge LED array.

Backlight driver code is done and ready to implement

But just for testing purposes, it might work fine as is, or it might jitter a little and constantly turn the brightness up and down, i havent yet implemented anything for stabilizing the output.

right now this code doesnt adjust the output at all, ill edit it later though so it does. But it is both reading and writing PWM signals, all that needs to be done is some quick math to set the output brightness value (0-1024)  to the PWM percentage of that, and do this only once every few seconds, furthermore, to ignore slight shifts in the brightness, or some other method for stabilizing the output.

 

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STM32 based MIDI synth

I realized the STM32F103C i have has a pretty high clock speed, so currently im trying to turn it into a basic FM oscillator synth. In other words, it will read midi input from another device, like piano, midi controller, etc, then convert it into sound.

I am using this library https://github.com/FortySevenEffects/arduino_midi_library , its as its described, basically plug’n’play, though there is a small number of tweaks and understanding to utilize this as i have found, not just for the stm32, but any board you use this with, less so though for the UNO R3

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