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Popular Arduino Boards

The Arduino Nano, one of many variations on the Arduino.

The most popular Arduino boards contain a USB connector that is used to provide power and connectivity for uploading your software onto the board. One of the most popular Arduino boards for people starting out is the Arduino Uno.

The Arduino Uno is built around the ATmega328, and has a second microcontroller onboard to handle all USB…

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Arduino Serial Communication

Arduino makes many stand-alone applications possible. In such cases, you need to connect the Arduino to a computer once to upload the software, and after that, it needs only a power supply. More often, people use the Arduino to enhance the capabilities of a computer using sensors or by giving access to additional hardware. Usually, you control external hardware via a serial port, so it is useful…

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Arduino IDE: Configuration

The Arduino IDE manages all the files belonging to your project. It also provides convenient access to all the tools you need to create the binaries that will run on your Arduino board.

Organizing all the files belonging to a project automatically is one of the most important features of an IDE. The Arduino IDE creates a directory for every new project, and it stores all the files belonging to…

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Arduino IDE: Compiling and Uploading

Arduino IDE: Compiling and Uploading

Before you compile and upload a program to the Arduino, you have to configure two things in the Arduino IDE:

The type of Arduino you are using

The serial port to which your Arduino is connected.

Identifying the Arduino type is usually easy, because it should be printed on the board. Popular types are the Uno, Duemilanove, Diecimila, Nano, Mega, Mini, NG, BT, LilyPad, Pro, or Pro Mini. In some…

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Arduino C Programming Basics

Arduino C Programming Basics

Arduino C programming – based on the C language

In the previous articles in this series, we covered installation of the Arduino IDE and some of the functions of the IDE. In this article, we’ll cover programming with the Arduino IDE, including some of the basics of Arduino C programming.

You might recall that in the previous article we introduced the following program to blink an LED:

const int…

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Arduino Programming: Using the IDE

Arduino Programming: Using the IDE

Arduino Programming: Meet the IDE

In the previous article, we covered installation of the Arduino IDE. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the basic features and functionality of the IDE.

When you launch the Arduino IDE, you’ll probably notice how basic it looks compared to some other popular IDEs like Visual Studio and Eclipse. Still, it has an editor, a compiler, a loader, and a…

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Arduino IDE: Installation and Setup

Arduino IDE: Installation and Setup

The Arduino IDE in action in Mint Linux.

At the heart of the Arduino is a programmable microcontroller. In order to program it, you need a means of writing and compiling code and uploading the resulting machine code. Fortunately, the Arduino developers have made life easy for us and created a simple, easy-to-use integrated development environment. It uses C/C++, and runs on many different…

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Arduino SPI Introduction

Intro to the Arduino SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface)

The Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) bus is a synchronous communication interface specification used for short distance communication. It is used primarily in embedded systems such as the Arduino. SPI devices communicate in full duplex mode using a master-slave architecture. There is one master device and one or more slave devices. The…

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Arduino SPI Introduction

Intro to the Arduino SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface)

The Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) bus is a synchronous communication interface specification used for short distance communication. It is used primarily in embedded systems such as the Arduino. SPI devices communicate in full duplex mode using a master-slave architecture. There is one master device and one or more slave devices. The…

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XML Processing with Python: Part Seven

XML Processing with Python: Part Seven

The following Python SAX and DOM parsers are available: xml.sax and xml.dom.minidom. Here is an overview of xml.dom.

xml.dom.minidom is a lightweight DOM implementation, designed to be simpler and smaller than a full DOM implementation.

Converting from XML to DOM and Back

In the following example, we’ll use the example XML file from the first article in this series, which we’ll save as mlb.xml:

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XML Processing with Python: Part Six

XML Processing with Python: Part Six

DOM (Document Object Model)

At the heart of DOM lies the Document object. This is a tree-based representation of the XML document. Tree-based models are a natural fit for XML’s hierarchical structure, making this a very intuitive way of working with XML. Each element in the tree is called a Node object, and it may have attributes, child nodes, text, and so forth, all of which are also objects…

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XML Processing with Python: Part Five

XML Processing with Python: Part Five

When parsing XML, you have your choice of two different types of parsers: SAX and DOM. SAX stands for the Simple API for XML. It was originally only implemented for Java, and was added to Python as of version 2.0. It is a stream-based, event-driven parser. The events are known as document events, and a document event might be one of several things; the start of an element, the end of an element,…

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XML Processing with Python: Part Four

XML Processing with Python: Part Four

XML is similar in structure and form to HTML. This is not entirely an accidental thing. XML and HTML both originated from SGML and share a number of syntactic features. The earlier versions of HTML are not directly compatible with XML, though, because XML requires that every tag be closed, and certain HTML tags don’t require a closing tag (such as and ). However, the W3C has declared the XHTML…

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XML Processing with Python: Part Three

XML Processing with Python: Part Three

In the previous article, we discussed the Document Type Definition (DTD) language. In this article, we will discuss Schema and XPath.

XML Processing with Python: Schema

Schema was designed to address some of the limitations of DTDs and provide a more sophisticated XML-based language for describing document models. It enables you to cleanly specify numeric models for content, describe character…

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The first in a series of articles on Python database programming, covering the different database systems supported by Python and different modules.

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An introduction to Python strings, including a comparison with C strings.

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The first in a series of articles covering exceptions and how they work within the Python programming language.