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Showing posts from December, 2019

Sipping power... sleep modes and Swift for Arduino

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One feature I have been meaning to add to S4A for a while now is sleep. It might not sound like an important feature but it could radically change the way projects are made. A critical distinguishing feature of S4A is that it creates true native programs for the atmega328p microcontroller, meaning you don't need to have an Arduino UNO, plugged into your laptop or desktop via USB for these programs (although of course you can). This sets it aside from many other attempts to simplify Arduino programming in the past, that effectively run programs on a full PC/Mac then send serial commands to the board to activate it. The next step... how do you make a project that lives on batteries? Well, right out of the box you can do that, at least for a while. See my Hallowe'en project from last year on this blog that I made for my daughter. But that lasted a couple of days on batteries before it faded. Anything with lots of lights and motors is going to need a lot of battery, of co