battery-tester

Just want to signal-boost Markus Wandel's Ni-MH battery tester/matcher on Github: https://github.com/MarkusWandel/battery-tester I'm (lackadaisically) building a version of it now, in order to get matched pairs and fours of the 40-plus eneloops that we have. And identify the bad ones, of course.

I have a couple of Arduino projects that do 5 or more simultaneous things. Temperature sensors busy with a conversion, A/D converters taking readings, timers ticking, serial ports being watched for characters and so on. You can speak of "hard realtime" but all of this stuff works just fine in a polled fashion, just get through your main loop quickly and don't block on anything. With nothing much to do the main loop cycles 5-10K times per second even on simple AVR328. And then you have readable, easily maintained code without gnarly interrupt handling, realtime threads and all that. Need microsecond level hard realtime performance? Then don't do that. Though my superficial reading is that you can partly escape from the Arduino environment to do that too, without having to give up all of it. Need microwatt level power consumption? Then

I used to program Intel 8031 (the ROMless version of the original MCS-51) in assembly language. Really low level, like the exact right number of NOP instructions to get a loop to run at 38KHz to generate a (modulated!) infrared carrier in software. And I got more functionality out of that primitive part than most modern Arduino programs get out of a microcontroller that's about 10x better. And I don't care! A few years ago I got an Arduino starter kit at a garage sale. I have kids now and not much geek time. I finally plugged the thing in, and literally 5 minutes later I was running code on it. Who cares that it's inefficient. It makes the difference between a project built and one not built. I already posted my most recent one the other day, but why not again... https://github.com/MarkusWandel/battery-tester The code is right the