Arduino preface
May 27, 2008When I was in year 10 (or 11, I can’t remember), the school ran an after school exracurricular class for electronics. On the whole it was pretty boring but I did learn some pretty cool things. I learned how to solder, got my TAFE certificate 2 for double sided and surface mount components. We did some basic circut stuff (later superseeded by my uni studies). Most notibly though were the 6 sessions spent doing pic programming.
Pics, for those that dont know, are little microcontrollers (like CPUs) that have a small array of inputs and outputs. They have basically replaced circuts in everything. Its more cost effective these days to program a pic to delay your car windscreen wipers than it is to make a traditional little circut. We used the 16F84 which can do a whopping 20Mhz and we programmed it in asm. The timing was noutoriously hard and interfacing communication with it was pretty impossible. I tried to make a midi instrument with a more powerful version of it but still had many problems.
I recently ordered and recieved a Arduino development platform (www.arduino.cc). Its an open source microcontroller based on the Atmega168. I got the Decimilia version, the specs are available on the arduino website but in short, its USB, a heap of digital inputs, analog inputs, PWM (pulse width modulation) outputs and digital outputs. The USB is really just a serial adapter rather than a custom USB host but on the whole- its much much easier to develop for than the pic ever was.
Much of its simplicity is the premade libraries that come with the IDE that make interfacing servos/stepper motors and doing PWM much much easier. The communications problems that I had with the pic are all gone too as you can just set a baud rate and use simple send recieve buffers. In the first 2 hours that I had it I got it sending a scale thru the USB port as a midi stream, interfaced 2 servos to it and in the 3rd hour, I got a 16×2 line LCD working.
I got mine from Littlebirdelectronics (www.littlebirdelectronics.com.au) who were pretty slow and expensive ($40 or so with shipping). The Arduino nano (http://www.arduino.cc/blog/?p=39) came out just the other day. It looks like the perfect solution for compact and simple projects.
I have a few in the pipe and as soon as stufy slows down Ill have them working. The Arduino is so damn flexible (in terms of applications) that it really is a must have for anybody with a project in mind.