Ryan Mitchell

When you build a mobile robot, the wheel system you choose shapes everything that follows. Your decision affects how the robot moves, how hard it is to program, what surfaces it can handle, and how much money you spend over its lifetime. The three options that dominate mobile robot locomotion are differential drive, mecanum wheels, … Read more

PWM servo control is the signaling method that tells a hobby servo exactly where to point its shaft. Every RC car steering linkage, robot arm joint, and drone gimbal relies on these tiny electrical pulses to move with precision. If you have ever wondered why your servo jitters, why it only responds at 50Hz, or … Read more

Every robotics builder hits the same fork in the road eventually. You stand in front of three boards — an Arduino, a Raspberry Pi, and an ESP32 — and the question stares back at you: which one do I actually need? I have been building robots and embedded systems for over a decade, and our … Read more

Interrupt handling on a microcontroller is the mechanism that lets the processor pause whatever it is doing, respond immediately to an important event, and then pick up right where it left off. Instead of constantly checking whether something happened, the CPU waits for a signal and reacts only when needed. This approach saves processing time, … Read more

If you have spent any time around robotics engineering, you have probably heard the term FPGA thrown around in conversations about motor controllers, sensor fusion, and real-time processing. But what exactly is an FPGA, and does it actually matter for building robots? An FPGA, or Field-Programmable Gate Array, is a type of integrated circuit that … Read more

A Raspberry Pi Compute Module is a compact version of a standard Raspberry Pi single-board computer (SBC) that strips away the familiar USB, HDMI, and Ethernet ports in favor of high-density connectors for custom hardware integration. Instead of a board you plug peripherals into, you get the brains of a Raspberry Pi on a small … Read more

Every robot you build has to deal with the real world. Light levels shift, battery voltage sags, motor current spikes, and distance sensors pick up walls that move. All of those signals are analog — smooth, continuous, and impossible for a microcontroller to read directly. That is where an ADC analog to digital converter comes … Read more

Every Arduino project that interacts with the real world depends on one fundamental capability: reading analog signals. Whether you are building a temperature monitoring station, a light-tracking solar panel, or a motor speed controller, understanding how the analog-to-digital conversion process works is the key to getting reliable data from your sensors. The short answer is … Read more

If you’ve been exploring single-board computers for embedded projects, you’ve probably asked yourself: what is a BeagleBone and when should you use one? I get this question all the time from readers who know Raspberry Pi and Arduino but feel uncertain about where BeagleBone fits. I’ve spent the last few months testing BeagleBone Black boards … Read more

Nothing kills momentum faster than plugging in your Arduino and seeing nothing happen. The board’s power LED flickers, but your computer acts like the device doesn’t exist. We have been there. After fighting this exact problem on dozens of builds, our team put together a complete walkthrough that covers every fix we have tried, from … Read more