Will the blinky ever stop? No! Not while I have tutorials to write.
This tutorial will teach you about switches and buttons, inputs, pull up and pull down resistors, debouncing, if and if-else statements and in the end you will build your own LED bike light, just like the ones you see in stores retailing for $25.
Ready for more Arduino tutorials? I’ve crawled out from under a pile of kits and finished up #4! This lesson will teach you all about sending data from the Arduino to the computer. You’ll also learn how to crunch numbers and juggle data. You can also watch as I make awful diagrams using Visio! Check it out here!
One of the nice things about the Arduino boards & software is they let people get started hacking electronics fast. However, I was looking for a good step-by-step tutorial that helped people with almost no experience through the first few steps of microcontroller programming and basic electronics design. At the same time, I’d been flipping through Parallax’s excellent “What is a Microcontroller” workbook and decided to start writing something similar.
So check out my Arduino Tutorial page and give me feedback! Right now I’ve got 3 lessons up, and will try to get a another 3 out in the next week and a half.
Lesson 0
Pre-flight check…Is your Arduino and computer ready?
Lesson 1
The “Hello World!” of electronics, a simple blinking light
Lesson 2
Sketches, variables, procedures and hacking code
Lesson 3
Breadboards, resistors and LEDs, schematics, and basic RGB color-mixing
At the end of lesson three, you build a mood lamp!
If you design and hack electronics for fun or work, then you know that PCB costs can be a big part of your budget. There’s a lot of manufacturers there, and they all use different pricing schemes.
Argh! So hard to compare!
So I wrote a javascript PCB cost calculator. Just punch in your PCB size and the minimum number you need and it’ll give you an idea of how much it will cost to make (shipping is approximated)
These two articles (Kitmakers and Kitmaking) cover things from how to deal with shipping & handling, to designing PCBs, to documentation and customer support. Check them out and make suggestions!
Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) isn’t new, but its certainly gaining traction. Its a wonderful product for people who have a lot of content on their site (images, video, downloads, pdfs) but not a lot of money. Data storage costs $0.15 per GB-Month (prorated), and $0.20 per GB. No minimums, rounded up to the nearest cent.
There are a lot of great providers out there (I use Laughing Squid and highly recommend it) but even LS’s ‘largest’ package is too small for ladyada.net… What to do? Easy: Host all that bulky content at S3, then use mod_rewrite to reroute it over to S3. (You could also do it with php, asp or similar for higher ’security’ but mod_rewrite is lighter and good enough for me)
For example, this image has the url reference “http://www.ladyada.net/images/mintyboost/assemblyv12/inductorusbplace_t.jpg” but if you access that url in your browser, it is automatically rewritten by apache to http://s3.amazonaws.com/ladyadanet_mintyboost/assemblyv12/inductorusbplace_t.jpg
(same with my research pdf, a big pdf that easily accounted for 500M a day of traffic at its peak! http://www.ladyada.net/media/common/thesis.pdf -> http://s3.amazonaws.com/ladyadanet_common/thesis.pdf , S3 doesn’t care what the data is or how its encoded)
Of course mod_rewrite is not necessary, you can always just directly reference s3.amazonaws.com but that makes it harder to move the content around if you decide to eventually go with another service (or if s3 goes away one day!)
OK so, what’s the point and what does this have to do with electronics, eh? Well one of the killer apps of open source and public domain electronics is documentation. That means media. And media storage, backup and transfer is extremely expensive for the everyday person. It becomes increasingly difficult to host a project when one digg-storm or slashdotting makes that ‘free’ webpage account go down.
Edit: I use the Firefox S3 plugin to upload and set the access control on my files.
Are you using S3 or something similar for your projects, kits or documentation? Leave a comment or email! Its always interesting to see what other people are doing in this space.
Mix & Match soldering irons, multimeters and wire cutters to get the set that fits you best.
Click “Read the rest…” to see the full “basic kit” as of this moment (it won’t be updated so be sure to bookmark http://www.ladyada.net/library/equipt-kits.html instead ) (more…)
Check out the new Laser Information pages for all of your $20K laser cutter setup needs!
Its another Wiki embedded page: it looks like a normal web page but if you click the link at the top it will take you to the Wiki where the data is kept. That way, the 99% of people who just want the info don’t have to deal with the strange look of a wiki.
I’ve decided to experiment with the Wiki architecture for dynamic/collaborative documentation. For my kits and projects, wiki’s make less sense than forums, but a lot of people email me with resources so the “parts procurement” page that has been so popular that I’ve turned it into embedded content.
I spent a little time and added ‘Google custom search’ to the top right corner of nearly everything on ladyada.net, it will search both sites for everything you want to find here!
It seems to search the store, blog, forums and all content: hooray!
Printable catalog (PDF)
