Arduino on the way

[madbean]

Finally got around to ordering an Uno rev.3 board. Should be fun for some DIY projects. Anyone else playing with one?

[GhostofJohnToad]

Yup I play around a little bit.  Under the build reports section I have something I built with one - an arduinome, there's a video too. 

I'm working on a time lapse photo thing currently.

[gtr2]

Yup.  I actually have two now. 

Josh

[Peteyboy]

I haven't used one ever,
but I did find this site a few months ago that has a DIY Arduino work-a-like project.
Parts through tayda only cost ~$4.00.

http://shrimping.it/blog/shrimp/

I plan on trying one of these out when a take my first microcontroller course at university in a few months.

[madbean]

Yeah, I feel ready to start stepping into the world of micro-controllers, too. Man, I wish I had known about this stuff when I was in college. It's hard to start from knowing almost nothing (again), haha.

[gtr2]

Yeah, I felt pretty silly when I started learning about them.  Kids 10 and under are making/programming things that are insane...

[TNblueshawk]

Well after Josh's post I guess I'm dumber than a 10 year old but....

Can someone tell me what in the hell is an "arduino" and what does one do with these things?

[rullywowr]

I just got mine last week (UNO rev 3.) along with a 16x2 LCD.  I wish I had something this easy to program when I was in school.  I have some ideas on how to integrate this into some cool pedal projects- here are some I am working on:

- LCD based Germanium Transistor tester:  Idea to test for gain and leakage and do the "math" for you so you just have to push a button and the result will display on LCD.  The arduino can read voltages up to VCC (5v) in 1023 step increments.  

-LCD based JFET matcher.

- Digital pot chip with Arduino:  Can do cool modulation effects by hooking up to say the "drive" pot on a fuzz.  Or you could use it to store "presets" for different settings.  MAKE magazine has a cool YouTube video by Colin that shows him making a BMP fuzz do crazy effects.

- LFO and other modulation effects controlled by the arduino as the PWM, simply connect this to the LED side of a vactrol to do some cool effects.

Tayda has a bunch of Arduino based components for cheap.  It should be known that once you get a project working on the Arduino (ATMEGA328P) chip, you can either port the project to an embedded standalone ATMEGA328 (28 pin) or you can shrink it by using the ATTINY85/45 series or similar which are 8pin DIP.   MEGA328P are around 3 bucks and the Tiny series is around 2 each.

On your next order to Tayda, I highly recommend anyone interested in Arduino to get some ATMEGA328P, some header sockets, 16MHz crystals, and some ATTiny chips along with the stackable sockets.  Also recommend getting some digital pot chips, some shift register IC (lets you control a parallel LCD with only 3 wires), some 9v and 5v regulators, and of course some protoboard.  I ordered 4 16x2 LCD backlit blue displays on eBay from china for like $3 bucks a piece.

I think an analog pedal with a LCD digitally controlled display has some serious sexiness about it.

[rullywowr]

Well after Josh's post I guess I'm dumber than a 10 year old but....

Can someone tell me what in the hell is an "arduino" and what does one do with these things?

Check out YouTube for "arduino" or "arduino LED cube" for starters.

Arduino is an open source microcontroller board based upon an 8-bit AVR microcontroller that hooks up to USB.  The board is in a standard format (and you can build your own if you wish) and has pins for all inputs/outputs, along with stackable header pins which accept "shields."  You can create your own shield or there are many out there that do many different things with sensors, displays, ethernet, wifi, sd cards etc. to add functionality to your project.

You start with making Arduino blink a LED (the simplest project) and then you can go from there.  With relays and other accessories you can control AC power, do remote WiFi, send twitter messages, etc etc...The microcontroller can do just about anything (within reason).  You are limited to its MHz speed (16MHz), pin out, and 32K of memory however there are ways (add on chips and software tricks) to expand your abilities if you need more pins.  You typically use Arduino with a breadboard to get your project going then once you want to make it more permanent you can design a PCB around the microcontroller.

It can be programmed with the Arduino IDE (integrated development environment) which is based around  a C compiler.  It has the ability to do many things and create many cool projects.  The microcontroller can do cool things like read sensors of all varieties, or analog and digital inputs, and output PWM.  The best part is that Arduino is open source and the idea is to encourage to share code and projects with others to do cool things, all while learning about microcontrollers.  Once a project is ready to be "embedded" you can simply download the code to a dedicated chip and make this chip (or a smaller ATtiny chip) part of your circuit/project.  

The sky is the limit - Arduino simply makes programming microcontrollers easy and accessible to those who are learning and makes it as easy as compiling code, and pressing "upload" to your USB connected board.  

Inside an hour of opening the box, I had arduino up and running and made a 16x2 LCD display work to display whatever I wanted.  I created a countdown timer that said "Detonation in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1" and displayed "BOOM" with beeping a piezo buzzer.

[jkokura]

Totallly useful. I'd build something and give it to my wife. Then have it timed so it would say that at some point when she was playing with it, the countdown would begin...

She'd totally freak.

jacob

[GermanCdn]

Totallly useful. I'd build something and give it to my wife. Then have it timed so it would say that at some point when she was playing with it, the countdown would begin...

She'd totally freak.

jacob

(Picking myself off the floor from laughing far too hard)

Before this idea, I was like "There's no way I'm going to torture my poor brain into actually trying to learn something new"


Now - I must do it.

[TNblueshawk]

Well after Josh's post I guess I'm dumber than a 10 year old but....

Can someone tell me what in the hell is an "arduino" and what does one do with these things?

Check out YouTube for "arduino" or "arduino LED cube" for starters.

Arduino is an open source microcontroller board based upon an 8-bit AVR microcontroller that hooks up to USB.  The board is in a standard format (and you can build your own if you wish) and has pins for all inputs/outputs, along with stackable header pins which accept "shields."  You can create your own shield or there are many out there that do many different things with sensors, displays, ethernet, wifi, sd cards etc. to add functionality to your project.

You start with making Arduino blink a LED (the simplest project) and then you can go from there.  With relays and other accessories you can control AC power, do remote WiFi, send twitter messages, etc etc...The microcontroller can do just about anything (within reason).  You are limited to its MHz speed (16MHz), pin out, and 32K of memory however there are ways (add on chips and software tricks) to expand your abilities if you need more pins.  You typically use Arduino with a breadboard to get your project going then once you want to make it more permanent you can design a PCB around the microcontroller.

It can be programmed with the Arduino IDE (integrated development environment) which is based around  a C compiler.  It has the ability to do many things and create many cool projects.  The microcontroller can do cool things like read sensors of all varieties, or analog and digital inputs, and output PWM.  The best part is that Arduino is open source and the idea is to encourage to share code and projects with others to do cool things, all while learning about microcontrollers.  Once a project is ready to be "embedded" you can simply download the code to a dedicated chip and make this chip (or a smaller ATtiny chip) part of your circuit/project.  

The sky is the limit - Arduino simply makes programming microcontrollers easy and accessible to those who are learning and makes it as easy as compiling code, and pressing "upload" to your USB connected board.  

Inside an hour of opening the box, I had arduino up and running and made a 16x2 LCD display work to display whatever I wanted.  I created a countdown timer that said "Detonation in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1" and displayed "BOOM" with beeping a piezo buzzer.

Thanks for the excellent answer Rully and breaking it down for me. I need to get out more.

[REPTAR]

I've had one for a while.  Haven't done anything with it lately.  I did make a little electronic drum set with it to work via Mainstage on my computer a while back.  Very interested in what you guys will come up with. I need to go dig mine up again now haha

[rullywowr]

Totallly useful. I'd build something and give it to my wife. Then have it timed so it would say that at some point when she was playing with it, the countdown would begin...

She'd totally freak.

jacob

Haha!

Kinda reminds me of the "Annoy-O-Tron"..

http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/8c52/

[RobA]

I've got an Uno and a Due. They are a good place to start learning and to figure out what's possible. I still use them for prototyping. But, you can actually do more if you just program the AVR's straight.

I started last week to do a kinda random tremolo based on an ATTiny84 chip. So, I needed to learn to program the thing. The learning curve from Arduino to straight C using the AVR Libc and avr-gcc with AVRdude as the programmer interface is really only a couple of days.

It took me one full (12 hour) day to get my first program written and the effect laid out on the breadboard. I'm now in the process of working out tap tempo control and the thing will be ready to layout and etch.

There are lots of programmers that are available to let you get your code onto the things. I've been using the AVRISP MkII which I got from Mouser pretty cheap. But, one of the things you can do with your Arduino is use it as a programmer for the AVR chips.