A relatively easy way to same a few milliamp hours of battery energy is to disable features of the ATmega328 your Arduino project isn’t using. Below are some examples of code you can use in your setup function to do this. void setup(void) { // The following saves some extra power by disabling some //

The voltage regulator built onto the Arduino Uno is a linear-type regulator and is horribly inefficient. If you are running the ATmega238 at 5V using a 9 V battery, approximately half of the battery’s energy will be dissipated as heat by the regulator. This post demonstrates a DC/DC switching-type voltage regulator circuit that can be

A bipolar junction transistor (either PNP or NPN type) can be used as an analog amplifier or as a digital switch. These days, it is probably much simpler to use an operational amplifier to achieve amplification of analog signals instead of building an amplifier using individual transistors but there are many situations where using a

A bit mask (or bitmask) is a sequence of bits that can be used with bitwise operations to change or flip bits in a byte or nibble. That may be a convoluted definition so let me give an example using Arduino-style code to try to clarify. byte myByte B01001011; myByte = myByte & B00010001; This

Using a shift register like the 74HC595 you can convert a serial signal to a parallel output. This is incredibly helpful if you need more digital outputs then the 14 that the ATmega328 on the Arduino Uno provides. The Arduino IDE includes a shiftOut() function that can be used to control an 8-bit shift register