Interrupts are exactly what they sound like. They are events that cause a microcontroller’s CPU to stop executing a main program in order to execute a snippet of code on the side. As an example, here I discuss how the analog comparator on the ATmega328 (Arduino Uno) can be configured to generate an interrupt. Let

The Arduino IDE has many built-in commands to produce PWM outputs but directly setting the timer registers gives you much more flexibility and power. Below I show how to configure the 8-bit Timer/Counter2 on the ATmega328 (Ardunio UNO) to generate a 40 kHz square wave on Arduino digital pin 11. Why 40 kHz? I want

On one warm spring afternoon during grad school when I should have been outside enjoying nature, I stayed in the lab and wrote the following MATLAB script. It will take any 8-bit RGB image and convert it to colored HTML text; any text. As an example of its application I have emblazoned my favorite positronic

Need a little Friday afternoon light physics reading. This article by John Walker about a high-energy proton that struck our atmosphere in 1991 will blow …. your …. mind. Follow this link to the article.

For a recent project one of my research students needed to generate exponentially distributed random numbers in MATLAB. The Statistics Toolbox has a built-in function to do this, but I don’t have a license for this toolbox. Below is the code we wrote. It performs a log transformation to convert a uniformly distributed random number