EEVBlog video on Arduino

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.

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.

Arduino UNO with a few fun modules

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!