Making things, and a very annoying thing

Last holidays I consolidated and "inventoried" all the various kits of electronics / making and mobile phones that I had amassed over the last years. And I decided that instead of gathering dust or just disposing of them, these things must be turned into something.

They don't need to be something useful, but they need to be something that does something, even if it's useless.

That's the perfect excuse to finally learn some hardware and maybe contribute to the Internet of Things. Ha!

Today I brought back to life an old Arduino Duemilanove board. I think it's from 2009 but it could also be from 2008. It was gathering dust on a box, but not anymore. It took me a while to figure out what the method to upload my sketches to the board should be.

In theory I should just be able to open the Arduino IDE, select the board (Duemilanove or Diecimila), the chip (ATMega 168) and the port (/dev/tty.usbserial-blabla). And then I could push sketches to the board as many times as I wanted.

In practice I can only upload once and then the next time I have to disconnect and reconnect or else I get an error message about unresponsive programmers:

avrdude: stk500_recv(): programmer is not responding avrdude: stk500_getsync() attempt 1 of 10: not in sync: resp=0x00
Some people say that they found the same issue and wrote a Python script to reset the board before uploading stuff. The official documentation says that these boards are able to be reset before uploading, but maybe they aren't. I tried using the script, but I of course stumbled upon Python lacking the Serial library on my system and I gave up because installing things in Python is not only like opening another can of worms, but also being forced to chew on a few of them: DISGUSTING.

I found out that I can brute force reset the board by... disconnecting it every time.

This is horrible, but works.

And without further ado, allow me to introduce a very annoying thing I just made:

https://twitter.com/supersole/status/685598237110202368

I was a bit tired of always using LEDs as the "Hello World" of Arduinos. I had a couple of buzzers around and it turns out that you can replace the LEDs with a buzzer, and it will beep instead of blink. And all using the same sketch code!


void setup() {
  pinMode(13, OUTPUT);
}

void loop() {
  digitalWrite(13, HIGH);
  delay(100);
  digitalWrite(13, LOW);
  delay(1000);
}

This sounds as annoying as a smoke alarm. Perhaps my next creation will be a Prank Smoke Alarm!