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Before smartphones exploded on the scene in the late 00s, there was still a reasonable demand for pocket-sized computers that could do relatively simple computing tasks. Palm Pilots and other PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) were all the rage in the ’90s and early ’00s, although for cutting-edge tech from that era plenty of these devices had astronomical price tags. This Arduino-based PDA hearkens back to that era, albeit with a much more accessible parts list.

The build is based around an Arudino Nano with an OLED screen and has the five necessary functions for a PDA: calculator, stopwatch, games, phonebook, and a calendar. With all of these components on such a small microcontroller, memory quickly became an issue when using the default libraries. [Danko] uses his own custom libraries in order to make the best use of memory which are all available on the project’s GitHub page. The build also includes a custom PCB to keep the entire pocket computer pocket-sized.

There are some other features packed into this tiny build as well, like the breakout game that can be played with a potentiometer. It’s an impressive build that makes as much use of the microcontroller’s capabilities as is possible, and if you enjoy projects where a microcontroller is used as if it is a PC take a look at this Arduino build with its own command-line interface.

Every time one of us flashes an Arduino’s internal memory, a nagging thought in the backs of our minds reminds us that, although everything in life is impermanent, nonvolatile re-writable memory is even more temporary. With a fixed number of writes until any EEPROM module fails, are we wasting writes every time we upload code with a mistake? The short answer is that most of us shouldn’t really be concerned with this unless we do what [AnotherMaker] has done and continually write data until the memory in an Arduino finally fails.

The software for this is fairly simple. He simply writes the first 256 ints with all zeros, reads them to make sure they are all there, and then repeats the process with ones. After iterating this for literally millions of times continuously over the course of about a month he was finally able to get his first read failure. Further writes past this point only accelerated the demise of the memory module. With this method he was able to get nearly three million writes before the device failed, which is far beyond the tens or hundreds of thousands typically estimated for a device of this type.

To prove this wasn’t an outlier, [AnotherMaker] repeated the test, and did a few others while writing to a much smaller amount of memory. With this he was able to push the number of cycles to over five million. Assuming the Arduino Nano clone isn’t using an amazingly high-quality EEPROM we can safely assume that most of us have nothing to worry about and our Arduinos will be functional for decades to come. Unless a bad Windows driver accidentally bricks your device.

Thanks to [morgan] for the tip!

Watching the advancement of technology is interesting enough by looking at improved specifications for various components as the years go by. But clock speeds, memory size, and power consumption are all fairly intangible compared to actual implementation of modern technology when compared to days of yore. For example, this $40 microcontroller can do what a video game console was able to do in the 80s for a tenth of the (inflation adjusted) price.

The NESDUE is an emulator for NES games which runs completely on an Arduino Due. The Arduino does have some limitations that have to be worked around to get the Nintendo to work, though. For one, it needs to be overclocked to be playable and it also needs a workaround to get past the memory limit of 96 kB of RAM. From there, a small screen is wired up along with a controller (from a Super Nintendo) and the gaming can begin.

This is an impressive feat for an Arduino platform to accomplish, especially with the amount of memory tweaking that has to happen. This might be the most advanced gaming system available that runs everything on an Arduino, right up there with the Arduinocade which can provide an arcade-like experience straight from the Arduino as well.

Img_9444I designed a two player version of Simon that runs on Arduino, letting you play head to head.

Read more on MAKE



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