Thursday, May 25, 2017

Arduino IDE: Best practices and gotchas

Programming for the Arduino is designed to be easy for beginners. The Integrated Development Environment (IDE) provides a safe place to write code, and handles the make and compiler steps that are required to create processor instructions from your C++ code.

This is fine for trivial applications and school exercises. But as soon as you try to use structured code (including classes and custom libraries) on a larger project, mysterious errors and roadblocks become the order of the day.

This article will consider best practices for working within the IDE. I will document a number of common errors and their workarounds. My perspective is of an experienced Python coder who finds C++ full of needless obfuscation. But we can make it work!
Wednesday, May 03, 2017

Valentine's Day microphone test revisited

In the original Valentine's Day microphone comparison I tested three sets of mics in different scenarios. The files are still available, so you should visit that article if you haven't already.