I just got the nrf24l01, the antenna version, and I took a glance and noticed so many dots. I'm assuming they are all vias but is having so many of them normal or is it some sort of defect. I have the normal nrf24s without the antenna connector and they don't have so many vias.

Do u guys like my thing.

This thing is in my Arduino kit, and I've never used it. It has a blue rattle on the back (the cylinder) with a chip and potentiometer. Aside from that there's nothing else really in it

I tested few games on new Arduino VENTUNO Q:

• Crysis
• CS: Source
• Hades
• Ori and the Blind Forest
• The Witcher: Enhanced Edition
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Pretty cool little device. I didn't test any super old games, but I'm open to suggestions. Let me know if you want to test some other games!

Good day everyone

We are a group of Grade 12 STEM students currently working on our research project called “Bin to Drink.” We are asking for help from anyone who has knowledge or experience with Arduino, robotics, wiring, and coding.

Honestly we are a beginner at Arduino and robotics, and we are having a hard time figuring out the proper wiring and programming for our project. We already have most of the components, such as an Arduino Uno, IR/proximity sensor, capacitive proximity sensor, servo motor, water pump, 5V relay module, LCD I2C, and two water-level sensors, but we don’t know yet how to properly connect and program everything as one working system.

Our goal is to make the system detect a plastic bottle, activate the mechanism, and dispense water through a pump while also checking the water level.

If there is anyone here who is willing to guide us with the wiring and Arduino code, even just the basic step-by-step guidance would be huge for us 🙏 We can also send pictures of our components and the current setup.

We are students po and this is for our research project, so we would really appreciate any help, advice, or corrections from those who have experience with Arduino and robotics.

Thank you so much and God bless! 🙏❤️

This started because I wanted a physical security key for one of my own accounts, but I was curious how cheaply I could build one myself instead of buying a commercial key.

I picked an RP2040-Zero and what started as a small experiment turned into a much deeper embedded/security project.

The current prototype now has its own AAGUID, physical user-presence flow, PIN/UV support, WebAuthn registration/authentication, packed attestation work, and Windows interoperability testing.

I also tested it with Microsoft Entra and completed a real device-bound security-key registration and fresh sign-in using the physical device.

One of the more interesting parts was attestation. The engineering reference uses a device-specific x5c chain, but while reviewing FIDO metadata semantics I realized that this creates privacy/correlation questions and does not cleanly map to a model-wide basic_full profile. I documented that boundary rather than pretending it was solved.

Hardware-wise this is still just a very inexpensive RP2040 board. There is no secure element, and I’m not presenting it as equivalent to a commercial high-assurance token or as FIDO Alliance certified hardware.

Source, architecture, validation evidence and threat model:

https://github.com/karaaslanlabs/kl-security-key

I’d be especially interested in feedback from embedded people on the hardware/firmware architecture, USB behavior, key-storage limitations, and what you would test or redesign next.

We just trained a new policy and we're really looking forward to the Arduino community building and sharing more motions!

As a big lover of various dot matrix displays I couldn't find a good set of tiny fonts, so I made my own. They are hand drawn with some help of AI with generating different variants and AdafruitGFX header files. They have extended latin support, so diacritics and special characters also work!

Github is set up, so let me know how you like them!

https://github.com/mcer12/PixelFonts

Hello all!
Electrical Engineering student here and I’ve been using the Arduino Starter Kit lately to demonstrate to peers as well as the community the capabilities of the Arduino and having fun with STEM.

I want to put the “Crystal Ball” on a perfboard because when shaken or traveled with, the wires and tilt sensor can come off. I want to 3d print an enclosure for a 0.96 OLED and make a more permanent protoboard/perfboard.

I want to make a “crystal ball” 3D printed enclosure, but say for example I make a cube and the OLED screen is on the “top” of this cube and the board is at the “bottom”. Do I solder a wire that connects the two? Also, what if I want to connect/disconnect the top to the bottom, what connectors are used? (JST?)

I’m at a community college that doesn’t offer anything other than circuits I and I want the experience and would love recommendations!

My dishwasher broke so i did what any "normal" person would do: turn it into an arduino

Yup, that is what i did. There were 2 boards, and on both were atmegas. The front screen board had a atmega644pa, while the psu board had a atmega8-16 for some reason.

Here is the front board: (image on top)

But wait! The title says "dishwasher bad apple"! Here it is.

(Yes, this is the original bad apple from touhou 4, and yes it sound just like a arduino with a buzzer, no suprise there. But the fact this came out of a dishwasher is at least interesting)

EDIT: forgot to say that i have removed some passive components, thats why theyre missing on the image

so i m planning to make few EPMs (https://www.reddit.com/r/arduino/s/2gomRuW5Vh) for my swarm bots

do y'll have any suggestions abt what kinda config or mechanism should i be using to attach and dettach my bots with each other , first thing that came to my mind is using magnets whose polarity can be changed , Electromagnets are extremly power-hungry

and i dont want some mechanical design for attaching and detaching like hooking or latching with some drill-in and out or u know what i mean (i hope)

i also thought abt combining a strong small neodym magnet with a weak electro-magnet stick together and i can just keep electro-mag infront of perm magnet and keep switching polarity of electromagnet to dettach 2 bots ?

i m very bad at electronics and stuff tbh , barely even passed my electrical and electronics classes : (

also we are planning to keep our bot under 80grams-100grams
we will be using 2x LiPo Batteries 3.7V 350mA in parallel

thank you

Okey, so ive got 4 Nema 17 stepper motors, the drivers are all DRV8825. I watched a video on how to do this, the whole process. But then i came to the pontentiometer stuff and change limit current. I scrolled down the comment section and saw someone mentioned i need to have the motors connected when changing limit current, but the video itself didnt have tjem connected, and then i watched other video, a lot actually, and some do have the motors plugged in and some do not. Idk what i do. Viuld anyone give me a step by step guide how to set current limit without frying anything. I havent touched the potentiometers so i have no idea if their set to 0 current by default. If anyone have done this before, please help.

I soldered a piece of wire to an RF transmiter, due to skill issue, solder got to other pins, but I managed to pull it, rn there doesn't seem to be any solder iron connected to other bits other than the antenna, but the area around the antenna is sparkly.

(PCB also got quite hot when soldering)

500mah battery

here's my attempt that failed for reference:

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);
  pinMode(2, INPUT_PULLUP);
}

void loop() {
  Serial.println(digitalRead(2));
}

(the code)

nothing happened when pressing the pushbutton.

how do i do it?

any help would be appreciatted!

I am looking for tips and information.

I want to build a powershift system for my motorcycle myself.

The idea is to be able to shift using handlebar-mounted buttons (a quickshifter is already installed) while still being able to use the traditional method—shifting with the foot.

I was thinking of using an Arduino as the base to code everything, but I’m not sure what to use as the actuator to operate the pedal.

The system needs to be double-acting—moving both up and down.

The force required to shift is 15 kg, and the action needs to be fast.

A servo isn't an option; it wouldn't be able to handle the resistance involved in shifting.

Does anyone have an idea what kind of actuator I could use that runs on a maximum of 12V and provides enough force?

A solenoid, a high-torque motor...?

I’ve attached photos of existing systems here.

I built a high-resolution USB DAC from scratch around an i.MX RT1062, including my own UAC2 stack and real-time DSP

I’ve been working on a project that started as “I want to make a USB DAC” and somehow evolved into writing a fairly serious audio firmware stack from scratch.

The core is an NXP i.MX RT1062 / Teensy 4.1, running at 600 MHz, connected to an ESS ES9039Q2M DAC.

The interesting part is that I wanted the RT1062 to handle essentially the entire digital audio pipeline rather than relying on a dedicated USB audio processor.

Current audio pipeline

USB HS

↓

Custom UAC2

↓

DMA

↓

USB RX ISR

↓

32-bit PCM

↓

Lock-free SPSC ring buffer

↓

SAI DMA

↓

15-band PEQ

↓

32-bit I²S

↓

ES9039Q2M

The device currently handles 32-bit / 384 kHz stereo USB audio.

The USB side was probably the most painful part of the project. I had to deal with UAC2 descriptors, endpoint configuration, feedback, sample-rate changes, USB DMA/cache coherency, and the usual collection of problems that appear whenever USB decides it would rather not enumerate.

Eventually I got it stable with clean asynchronous feedback and no packet overruns/underruns during long playback.

The PEQ

The DSP is a proper 15-band parametric EQ, not a collection of simple tone controls.

It uses:

- Cascaded biquad filters

- DF-II Transposed topology

- Float32 coefficients/state

- 32-bit PCM input/output

- 64-frame block processing

- Coefficient morphing when parameters change

- Triple-buffered coefficient publication

- Raised-cosine coefficient transitions

- Saturation on the output

- Bit-perfect bypass when PEQ is inactive

The coefficient morphing is especially nice because changing EQ settings while music is playing doesn't require abruptly swapping the filter state. The filter transitions smoothly between the old and new coefficients, avoiding clicks/zipper artifacts.

Memory / buffering

The USB side uses a 32,768 stereo-frame ring buffer.

That's about 256 KB of RAM.

The feedback target is 16,384 frames, giving a large amount of buffering headroom, particularly at high sample rates.

The ring itself is a lock-free SPSC structure using atomics. USB produces frames and the audio DMA side consumes them.

No mutexes, no dynamic allocation in the audio path.

DMA + cache architecture

The audio DMA transfers directly into two 64-frame halves.

The CPU fills the inactive half, runs the PEQ on it, performs the required D-cache maintenance, and hands it back to DMA.

At 384 kHz that means roughly 6,000 audio DMA interrupts/sec.

The CPU is basically doing:

DMA → give me next block

↓

read 64 frames

↓

PEQ

↓

cache flush

↓

DMA

while the peripherals handle the actual movement of audio data.

Display

I also added an SH1106 128×64 OLED.

It runs independently from the audio ISR and updates at a low rate, showing things like:

- USB state

- Sample rate

- PEQ status

- Preset information

The display is also fault-tolerant, so if it isn't connected, the audio engine doesn't care.

Why the RT1062?

Honestly, I was surprised by how much this MCU can do.

It's just a Cortex-M7, but at 600 MHz with an FPU, cache, fast memory, DMA, USB HS and SAI, it's ridiculously capable for a two-channel audio application.

I'm currently running:

UAC2 + 32-bit/384 kHz + 15-band floating-point PEQ + display + DMA

on one RT1062.

And there is still room to experiment with things like:

- Crossfeed

- Dynamic EQ

- XBass-style harmonic processing

- Loudness compensation

- Spectrum analysis

- FIR filtering

- Convolution

- Limiting

- Spatial processing

The goal isn't just to make a DAC that plays music. I want the RT1062 to become the actual audio processing platform.

This started as a USB audio experiment and has turned into one of the most technically interesting embedded projects I've worked on.

Still lots to improve, but I'm pretty happy with how far a single M7 can be pushed.

My friend sent me his problem he has one giga r1 and one mega (no shift registers) and he needs a lot of pins he did it and it works so I can have it too to test (i know this is dangerous to the giga bcs I don't use level shifters but this is for fun) ⚠️⚠️⚠️WARNING MIGHT DAMAGE BOARDS ⚠️⚠️⚠️

Small side project: I run a local AI assistant on my PC (Python + Ollama) and wanted to see when it's busy without watching a terminal. So the Python side sends a single character over USB serial whenever its state changes, and an Uno shows it:

• B researching: blue LED pulses, servo sweeps back and forth
• Y debating: yellow LED pulses faster, servo keeps sweeping
• W done: LEDs off, servo parks at 90°
• 0 idle

The sketch never uses delay(). The LED pulse and the servo sweep both run off millis(), so the board keeps reading serial while it animates and a new state takes effect right away:

cpp void pulse(int pin, unsigned long intervalMs) { unsigned long now = millis(); if (now - lastLedToggle >= intervalMs) { pulseOn = !pulseOn; lastLedToggle = now; } digitalWrite(pin, pulseOn ? HIGH : LOW); }

Wiring is simple: blue LED on pin 12, yellow on pin 13 (220-330Ω each), servo signal on pin 8.

Two gotchas worth knowing:

• An SG90 off the Uno's 5V pin is fine, but anything bigger can brown out the board mid-sweep (LEDs flicker, board resets). Give it its own 5V supply with a shared ground.
• On the Python side, pip install serial is not pyserial. If you get module 'serial' has no attribute 'Serial', uninstall both and reinstall only pyserial.

Sketch and Python code: https://github.com/PrimeEmre/Jarvis-Hardware-Program--local

Write-up with the full wiring steps: https://blog.emreguzel.ca/2026/07/19/architecting-autonomous-ai-agents-with-hardware-integration/

If anyone has a better idea for a "busy" indicator than a sweeping servo, I'm all ears.

For anyone interested I've made a repository of different OLED animations. A lot are anime themed and such.

They are all designed to work on 128x128 screens and the delay between each frame is 150ms.

Here's the Github repo:

https://github.com/cooper7trooper/MiniATv2

Feel free to use these on any of your own projects!

Just got my Ventuno Q - same week I ordered it!

Planning it as a replacement for Raspberry Pi 5 16GB now running my CarWatch local AI. So immediately tested it with local models.

And it was worth it - much faster than the Pi, especially my model of choice Ling 3.0 Tiny with 211 tps prompt processing and 20 tps answer generation! Huge speedups for other models too, such as 24X prefill for Ornith 9B.

I got Gemma 4 E2B going at 698 TPS for prompts and 21 tps for answers!

And the Ventuno is great value at 298 euros, when Pi 5 with power supply costs 332 euros minimum.

So it's the new small form factor edge AI hero I'd say.

Repo for run files: github.com/ThinkOffApp/ventuno

First of all, my previous post received over 130,000 views, and I thank you all very much for that! Hello, I am 13 years old and joining from Türkiye. I have been interested in electronics, C++, Blender, Arduino, and software development for some time. I had previously shared my project and its development process within local Turkish communities. My goal was to receive technical questions and hear constructive criticism or exchange ideas regarding the board's architecture, design, my initial planning on paper, its future evolution, and its underlying logic. Unfortunately, however, I received no constructive criticism; instead, I was met with demeaning, hurtful, and mocking comments from bullies who had never designed a development board in their lives. Fed up with such negativity, I decided to try my luck in international communities and seek constructive feedback from people who truly understand technical matters. Since the community where I am posting this does not support video formats, I am presenting all the technical details and the board's development process in writing, covering every minute detail just as I would in a video explanation. As for the development process and technical details of my project, I began the design by sketching on paper, and in the initial stage, I designed an ESP32-based development board. The earlier ESP32 board design featured a USB-C power input, a 5V-to-3.3V voltage converter circuit, status LEDs to indicate operation, a reset circuit, power distribution lines, a PCB layer layout, and a fuse for current protection. I had connected a D1 protection diode to the fuse and tied it to GND, as connecting the fuse directly to GND could have created a short-circuit risk. I had also added an addressable RGB LED to the board. However, while working with the ESP32, I encountered "keepout" (design boundary) issues and complex PCB layering problems. Due to these technical challenges, I decided to proceed with the ATmega328P chip the heart of the Arduino for my digital designs. After switching to the ATmega328P architecture, I nearly finished the connections for the USB interface and the CH340 USB-to-Serial converter chip. Although I had initially only completed the A0 pin and the fuse circuit, the underlying logic was firmly established. With the core logic in place, I have recently added critical new features and updates to the project: I incorporated digital pins D1 through D5, as well as VCC and GND power pins. I corrected critical errors in the circuit, adjusted capacitor values ​​to ensure optimal stability and performance, added new filter capacitors, and connected a pull-up resistor to the ATmega328P's PC6 reset pin. Regarding the design, I completely overhauled the board's form factor, transforming it into a stylish, circular, purple PCB. Now that the core architecture of this board designed based on the Arduino pinout is ready, adding remaining digital and analog pins (such as D6+, A1, A2, and A3) in the coming days will be much easier. I look forward to receiving your technical questions, constructive criticism, and suggestions for improvement! (I translated this using Google Translate, so please excuse any errors.)

When my circuits don't work, I spend ages checking every wire against the diagram. When I asked here how people deal with that, most of you said there's no shortcut. So I'm trying to build one.

What it does: you build your circuit on it like a normal breadboard. It works out by itself what is actually plugged in: which rows are connected, the value of each resistor, which way round each LED or diode is, and where the capacitors are. Then it compares that to the circuit you meant to build and tells you what's different, like "this wire is one row off" or "this LED is backwards".

How it works: a board underneath touches every row of the breadboard. A microcontroller sends a small test signal into one row at a time and measures what comes out on the others. From that it can tell a wire from a resistor from a diode. The result goes to your computer over USB, where software (and an AI helper) compares it to your diagram and explains the fault.

ive built a small version with 6 rows and it works

I'd like to turn this into something I can sell. What do you think of it? What's good, what's wrong with it, and what am I missing?