Monthly Archives: October 2017

Debugging AVR ATMEGA code with Atmel Studio and ICE

One of the more challenging aspects of writing code for microcontrollers is not being able to liberally sprinkle your code with PRINT statements to show the state of variables and whatnot at particular moments. If you’re working with Arduino-type devices you can always fire up the Serial library and print stuff that way – back down the wire to a… Read more »

The joy of the scope

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Most of the books about electronics for beginners in my library say something like this in the first chapter: ‘you don’t need an oscilloscope’. Yes you do. Well, maybe need isn’t the right word. Yes, you can laboriously chart voltage levels from a capacitor by measuring at regular intervals with a multimeter (at least two of the books have you do… Read more »

Fault finding: the aha! moment

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Well, maybe not so much aha! More like FFS. Weird as it sounds, debugging errors is one of the things I enjoy about both coding and electronics. I’m an amateur in both fields and waste little time on planning my projects. I prefer just to delve right in. Rather than sketch out a circuit first, for example, I just get… Read more »