A little aquarium maintenance never hurt anyone. Doing a little filter maintenance, cleaning out my Fluval 306 canister filter.

About 8 months ago I decided to get a fish tank. It’s been a while since I posted anything so I decided to post a pic of what I’ve been doing on some spare time.

This tank has been setup for about 6 months now and has gone through lots of changes over that time. This pic is what it looks like as of about a week ago.

Maybe as time permits I’ll chronicle my adventures in fish keeping to share my knowledge, successes and failures as I learn more about this hobby.

A new toy just arrived for me to mess around with. I bought it mainly for the ability to do data logging and as a side project to learn about wireless communications.

Look for posts on this wireless SD shield in the near future as I learn more about it and how to use it.

If you want to know more about this shield right now, check it out on the official Arduino site.

A while back a wrote up instructions on how to program an Arduino with an AVRISP mkII.

Back then the current software for the Arduino IDE was set at 0022 and it required you to modify a file to get it work.

Apparently enough people wanted a feature like that to come built into the Arduino IDE that it has now become reality. No more modifying of files.

It’s extremely easy to do know and I’ll show you exactly how to do it, so go ahead and fire up the Arduino IDE, plug in your programmer (I’m still using an AVRISP mkII) and plug up your Arduino Uno to an external supply and to your programmer.

First select which board you plan on using:

Next select the programmer you plan on using:

Lastly, when you are ready to upload your sketch to your Arduino, hold the the shift key when you push the upload button. You’ll notice the words change when you hover your mouser over it while hitting the shift key.

That’s it! Simple as pie. Using this method you will bypass the Arduino bootloader, freeing up some flash memory as well as avoiding the initial startup sequence that needs to be used for the tradition sketch upload.

Update: 6/25/12

Here is the driver I use on my computer so that the AVRISP connects correctly and can be used by the Arduino IDE to program your board or burn the bootloader. Save it, and unzip it. It is a dll file. To use, go into the device manager and find AVRISP (not sure what it may be called in your system), and update the driver for it using the one I provided (it’s also buried in the Arduino folder). Normally its the device with the yellow exclamation symbol if it has no current driver.

The driver I have is not digitally signed, but you should be able to navigate through the error message and force it to update.

AVRISP mkII driver for Arduino

A picture of me doing a Tarzan style swing during a zip-lining adventure while on vacation in Cabo.

The zip-lining adventure was one of the most fun excursions I’ve done while on vacation. Right up there with cave tubing and four wheeling.

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