The creative adventures with ATtiny series microcontroller are awesome if you know how to play them. ATtinys — especially the ATtiny85s — are all around us, and by using one, we can shrink the size of ...

Most projects are built on abstractions. After all, few of us can create our own wire, our own transistors, or our own integrated circuits. A few months ago, [Julian Ilett] found a problem using the ...

Experience — or at least education — often makes a big difference to having a successful project. For example, if you didn’t think about it much, you might think it is simple to control the ...

What Are PID Controllers? PID control is the most commonly used control algorithm, used extensively in industrial, process, and commercial applications and has been universally accepted as the easiest ...

A few weeks ago, I installed an automatic water heater switch to my bathroom, but it was a crude device. What I really want to do is design a universal heater driver. That basic idea can be adapted to ...

…which would take a pulse-width-modulated waveform at any frequency, and produce a signal with exactly the same mark/space ratio, but at a nominated frequency (see ‘Why might this be useful?’ below).

I have been discussing control algorithms for a power supply and idly looking for some easy hardware on which to try the technique – hardware small enough to build into a prototype. See also: An AVR ...