March 2010, Elektor’s English edition brings an article on 20 Open Source Tools. Arduino is featured as the first one of a series of tools that we all admire. It is really nice to be featured in Elektor (though I know it is not the first time, there have been several articles before where readers were using the Arduino board to develop their projects). This same issue brings a very interesting article titled Small & Open Source embedded operating systems that can run on AVR … this means you could probably run many of those small OS on one of the Arduino board models.
Massimo, David, Tom, Gianluca and David are meeting up in New York City in mid-March, and we want to see you. We’re planning a get-together on March 20 with folks from the Arduino community. We hope to have a daytime meet-up to see each other’s work, trade tips on Arduino and talk about 1.0, and an evening of drinks somewhere as well. In order to do that, we need a head count so we can pick a place. If you’re interested and can make it that day, email uno@arduino.cc. When we have a general idea of how many people can make it, we’ll post a place and some details.
I thought the guys from Wired made me us look like crazy dudes in the pictures they took of us last year … but that photographer did a nice job compared to the photoshoped version of me coming out on this week’s Metro Teknik, the free paper about technology. The paper is featuring Arduino, and they took a couple of pictures here at my lab at K3. I am glad someone cares about our story and puts it into everyday people’s hands. The article is written in a language that is easy to understand and looks for examples of people working with Arduino at different levels. You can even see a how-to guide around the IDE … not bad at all … if it wasn’t for those pictures that make me look like the guy with the craziest hair-dude in the universe.
The Story – My daughters don’t brush their teeth long enough, if left to their own devices. When my wife or I brush their teeth, we do a nice thorough job that takes a little while but when the girls do it themselves, they tend to cut it short. Timing them doesn’t help, as they just stand there and chit-chat until the timer goes off. It’s not that they don’t brush their teeth LONG enough, it’s that they don’t brush their teeth WELL enough. It occurred to me that if could make something that monitored how WELL they brush their teeth—and maybe even guided them through the process a little—then they’d eventually establish better habits for the future. I started thinking about what I could build that would help them and settled on the notion that an accelerometer was the perfect sort of thing to keep tabs on what constitutes a brush “stroke” while they’re in there brushing their teeth. All I’d need to do is come up with a little hardware and software to make it happen. About the Hardware – For my birthday last year, I got myself an Arduino starter kit from www.adafruit.com and hadn’t used it for anything yet. I was curious about the Arduino platform and have read a lot about it. I figured it was time to build something on it and this toothbrush thing seemed like the perfect fit.
I’m a total newcomer to electronics, so I ordered LadyAda’s Toolkit, the Arduino starter pack, and I also got a miniPOV from makershed. I’m very happy to say that I successfully put the kit together and it works perfectly! Thanks for the very clear instructions, they made me feel like a pro. I had to order the serial to usb converter, as I’d neglected to, and added a couple of Arduino shields while I was at it. I’m hooked!, I’m going to get started on the Arduino tutorials now. Thanks for great products, tutorials and forums. I’m sure I’ll be asking a lot of questions along the way as I learn. I just wanted to stop in and say hi to everyone.
Libraries are great places, and not yet illegal in the United States! If you ever need to learn how to do something, like say fix a motorcycle, you can go to your local library and take out a book. Sure you could buy the book but the library is nice because as a resource you can get the book whenever you need it, keeping your house uncluttered. Software Libraries are very similar. We already studied what a procedure is, in lesson 3 : a procedure is a list of things to do. A library is a big collection of procedures, where all the procedures are related! If you, say, want to control a motor, you may want to find a Motor Control Library: a collection of procedures that have already been written for you that you can use without having to do the dirty work of learning the nuances of motors.
Added tone() and noTone() functions for frequency generation.
Added Serial.end() command.
Added precision parameter for printing of floats / doubles.
Incorporated latest version of Firmata.
Fixed bug w/ disabling use of the RW pin in the LiquidCrystal library.
No longer disabling interrupts in delayMicroseconds().
Fixed bug w/ micros() returning incorrect values from within an interrupt.
Fixed bug that broke use of analog inputs 8-15 on the Mega.
[environment]
Synchronized with the Processing 1.0.9 code base, bringing various fixes, including to a bug causing saving to fail when closing the last sketch.
Added support for third-party hardware in the SKETCHBOOK/hardware folder, mirroring the current structure of the hardware folder in Arduino.
Added Ctrl-Shift-M / Command-Shift-M shortcut for serial monitor.
Hold down shift when pressing the Verify / Compile or Upload toolbar buttons to generate verbose output (including command lines).
Moving build (on upload) from the applet/ sub-folder of the sketch to a temporary directory (fixing problems with uploading examples from within the Mac OS X disk image or a Linux application directory).
Fixed bug the prevented the inclusion of .cpp and .h (or .c and .h) files of the same name in a sketch.
Improved the Mac OS X disk image (.dmg): added a shortcut to the Applications folder, a background image with arrow, and new FTDI drivers.
…the boys soldered together an Arduino Proto Shield kit from Adafruit. You can witness their amazing efforts in super-speed time, where sixty minutes of inhaling metallic fumes has been condensed into three power-packed minutes!
I recently picked up an Arduino starter kit from Adafruit Industries. For those unfamiliar with the Arduino, it is a popular open-source processor and development kit for hobbyists. Starter kits are available from lots of places for about $50 or so. I wrote a quick little program for it to automatically tap the left or right buttons for you — depending on how far left or right you turn a potentiometer. This helps makes the game more tolerable, in my opinion. It’s not a cure all though — Checkered Flag also suffers from a pretty low framerate. Anyhow if anybody has an Arduino or decides to pick one up, here’s the program in it’s entirety — along a picture of my modified controller (with Arduino attached). The program could probably use a bit more tweaking — however I’ve probably taken it as far as I’m going to….
Come and get’em! Arduino Starter Packs back in stock! Heard about Arduino but not sure how to start? Want to learn how to work with electronics and microcontrollers but need a little help?
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