This YouTube video captures my feelings about the Arduino boards. It's from Dave Jones of EEVblog and he makes his, ah, unique comments about the whole project and I found that I agree with most of what he says.
Certainly, there's a ton of Arduino stuff out there on the web, but this video really expressed the essence of why I am using these boards now.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Fun with Arduino and modules
I bought an Arduino Uno R3, a ProtoShield, and a Ping sensor from my local Radio Shack store. It took me about 10 minutes to get my first blinking LED example to run on it after ripping open the box! That's mostly due to the LED being on the board itself, but I thought it was neat to be able to pull up example code in the IDE, compile it, and upload it to the board pretty quickly.
Playing with the Parallax PING ultrasonic sensor is fun and there is example code for it as well. I had code running that sent distance in inches and centimeters to the serial console in no time.
The blinking LED and serial interfacing only thrilled me for so long, so I ordered a couple of fun modules from SparkFun. One is the Emic 2 text to speech board that takes ASCII text from a serial port and speaks the text. Used with the PING sensor gave me a talking toy that announced a greeting and distance when somebody walked by.
Another module I ordered is the Dead On RTC real time clock board which is a Dallas Semiconductor DS3234 chip with a SPI interface and battery backup. Now I have a personal greeter that announces the time at the top and bottom of the hour. Cool!
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| Arduino UNO with a few fun modules |
The blinking LED and serial interfacing only thrilled me for so long, so I ordered a couple of fun modules from SparkFun. One is the Emic 2 text to speech board that takes ASCII text from a serial port and speaks the text. Used with the PING sensor gave me a talking toy that announced a greeting and distance when somebody walked by.
Another module I ordered is the Dead On RTC real time clock board which is a Dallas Semiconductor DS3234 chip with a SPI interface and battery backup. Now I have a personal greeter that announces the time at the top and bottom of the hour. Cool!
Saturday, August 31, 2013
Jumping on the Arduino bandwagon
I've decided to start playing with microcontrollers again. I just needed to choose which platform I would play with...
I was a fan of the Motorola series of microprocessors and controllers. I've played with the 6803, 6809, 6811, and most recently, the '908. My last '908 project used the HC908 Daughter card from Midnight Design Solutions (then an American QRP club project). It's a great card in that it brings out all the I/O pins to a couple of headers but it has to be programmed in assembly.
Since then, Motorola split and its chip division became Freescale Semiconductor. It seems the Freescale is more interested in commercial uses and the hobbyist had to struggle with programming individual chips . Sure, there were programmers, but I was too cheap to buy one and too afraid to build one.
About 10 years passed. The Microchip PIC series grew in popularity but it never sparked my interest.
Enter the Arduino! It was built from the ground up to be easy to program and get stuff connected (their goal is to get the non-techies interested in using their boards). The boards are based on the Atmel series of processors but that is not important as their C++ based programming language hides all that (mostly). Libraries are available on the net for all sorts of hardware interfacing.
The Arduino IDE runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It is very straight-forward and they give a bunch of examples. Here's what I love about it: hack some code in the IDE, click on the download button, and the code is compiled, transferred to the board, and starts running. Easy, easy, easy!
You can purchase the boards directly from the Arduino folks in Italy and other electronic hobbyist sites like SparkFun and Adafruit sell them (and since the hardware is open source, these guys even have their own boards). Even Radio Shack stores in the USA have them on their shelves. I even bought a couple of boards from them which is shocking since I haven't bought anything from RS in years.
So far, the IDE and built-in bootloader have been great. If I outgrow the tools, I guess I could try to deal with the Atmel chips themselves or maybe I'll use some of those left over '908 chips I have lying around...
I was a fan of the Motorola series of microprocessors and controllers. I've played with the 6803, 6809, 6811, and most recently, the '908. My last '908 project used the HC908 Daughter card from Midnight Design Solutions (then an American QRP club project). It's a great card in that it brings out all the I/O pins to a couple of headers but it has to be programmed in assembly.
Since then, Motorola split and its chip division became Freescale Semiconductor. It seems the Freescale is more interested in commercial uses and the hobbyist had to struggle with programming individual chips . Sure, there were programmers, but I was too cheap to buy one and too afraid to build one.
About 10 years passed. The Microchip PIC series grew in popularity but it never sparked my interest.
Enter the Arduino! It was built from the ground up to be easy to program and get stuff connected (their goal is to get the non-techies interested in using their boards). The boards are based on the Atmel series of processors but that is not important as their C++ based programming language hides all that (mostly). Libraries are available on the net for all sorts of hardware interfacing.
The Arduino IDE runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It is very straight-forward and they give a bunch of examples. Here's what I love about it: hack some code in the IDE, click on the download button, and the code is compiled, transferred to the board, and starts running. Easy, easy, easy!
You can purchase the boards directly from the Arduino folks in Italy and other electronic hobbyist sites like SparkFun and Adafruit sell them (and since the hardware is open source, these guys even have their own boards). Even Radio Shack stores in the USA have them on their shelves. I even bought a couple of boards from them which is shocking since I haven't bought anything from RS in years.
So far, the IDE and built-in bootloader have been great. If I outgrow the tools, I guess I could try to deal with the Atmel chips themselves or maybe I'll use some of those left over '908 chips I have lying around...
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