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.
For a long time I’ve been interested in electronics, it comes with the geek territory. So when I read about the Arduino electronics platform and it’s ability to be programmed via Processing I was very excited. However, I decided to start small and build up my non-existent electronic skills.
To develop my skills I bought a MiniPOV v3 kit, this is a little kit designed to teach soldering, programming micro-controls and is just fun play with. In total, the kit took around five to six hours to construct and flash.
At first the soldering rather difficult and resulted in a few messy joints, but over time I got better, with faster and cleaner solders. While not perfect, it did work first time. I decided to document the process with a serious of photos and videos.
when i started building arduino brain machines i had a bunch of minipov boards left lying around, so i built one with uv leds. works pretty well. has it’s own font built in and room for about 950 characters of message. as presented here, there is an output bug at the end of the second line, but i reckon i’ll work on that in the morning. meanwhile, i can wave it around and wipe poetry onto a piece of butcher paper painted with fluorescent paint. here’s some not very good video of the chemical pov running the above code. the light does persist a little longer than it appears to in the video, but i think it will work better when i replace the current limiting resistors.
oPossom totally rocked my socks with a simple hack to turn a Minipov3 kit into an IR code receiver. The kit is modified to store incoming IR signal into the EEPROM which is then spit out via the serial port to a custom program that then translates it directly into a code for TV-B-Gone kits.
When I was in grade school I made a menorah in Hebrew school. Unfortunately it was just made of plastic and wood and when we left it lit overnight it caught on fire and scorched our windowpane.
Ryan of OHARARP, LLC is making a cool SMT practice kit, a persistence of vision toy!
Cool stuff: bright blue LEDs, boost converter means it runs on a single AA battery, USB connectivity to a PIC, comes with a stencil, solder paste, and wick.
Printable catalog (PDF) or (EPUB)
