Hobby

There are 13 entries in this Category.

A Beginner’s guide to making an Arduino Shield PCB

(This tutorial has gotten really popular recently, and I’m very pleased that so many people are interested. I learned all of this stuff while working on my first PCB. If you’re interested, I’ve started to sell the most recent version of my Arduino ProtoShield. If you’re making a shield, have fun and good luck!. If not, I hope you find something useful here -Aaron)

So you’re pretty fond of your Arduino. You make blinking lights, and beeping noises. You’ve made a robot that was pretty cool. Or maybe you didn’t. Who cares, You’re ready for the next step. You want to extend it. Although you can just plug in wires, there’s something very appealing about making a shield. Instead of a rats-nest of wires piled about and plugged into your prototyping breadboard, you can have a nice clean shield with labeled connections and a smaller footprint. So here I’m going to tell you everything you need to know to make a schematic and PCB layout, and get a beautiful shield that will plug into the top of your Arduino.

Posted on June 24, 2010 at 10:27 am 35 Comments

This post is filed under Hobby, Useful and tagged Arduino, Electronics, PCB, SparkFun, Tutorial.

My very first PCB

That is to say, my first PCB that I actually designed. I recently began attending a bi-weekly electronics hobbiest group call Dorkbot PDX. It’s basically an opportunity for nerds to show off their random electronics projects to people who might actually be interested.

Posted on May 17, 2010 at 7:54 am 3 Comments

This post is filed under Hobby and tagged Arduino, Dorkbot, Electronics, Nerd, PCB, Shield.

Building a 3D printer

I should start out by warning you that this is not a build-log. My friend Isaac reminded me that before we started this project, this was blogging gold, and he didn’t have a blog. He was implying that I should be the one to write this all down. I didn’t, but this should be interesting anyway.

Posted on March 14, 2010 at 12:57 am Leave a Comment

This post is filed under Hobby and tagged DIY, RepRap.

Weekend Project: Tree-Waterer

Christmas is upon us, and we have gotten ourselves a Christmas tree. My wife and I are dedicated Tree-Killers Live-Christmas-Tree-Advocates. We just like the feeling of a live tree. We moved into a house this year and have been enjoying a vaulted-ceiling. While at the tree-farm, we decided to pick a taller-than-usual tree and ended up with this Behemoth. It didn’t seem this tall at the farm, but getting it in, we realized how big and beautiful of a tree it was.

Posted on December 12, 2009 at 7:56 pm Leave a Comment

This post is filed under Hobby and tagged Christmas, Project, Tree.

Waiting for the E-Reader war to heat up…

If you would have asked me about e-readers a year ago, I would have told you that I knew Sony made one, the Kindle was pretty awesome, and there were a bunch more that were too expensive and far out to deal with. If you asked me three months ago, I would have told you that I had Kindle 2 Fever, and the Sony reader didn’t hold a candle to it.

Posted on July 26, 2009 at 10:14 pm Leave a Comment

This post is filed under Commentary, Hobby and tagged ebooks, eink, ereader, kindle 2, Sony prs-505.

Arduino Starter Rundown – Part 2

Update: A useful comparison chart of Arduino Starter kits has been posted (by me) at ConductiveResistance.com. I invite you to check it out there.

When I wrote the first part of this series, I didn’t plan for it to be a series. I was just thinking about a couple of Electronics companies that I like that sold a product that I like. It turns out though, that there’s a deeper need for this kind of article. A mostly-comprehensive look at Arduino sets that will spell out what has what, and how they compare. I got one concern that I’d only looked at American companies. So I’ve dove in and I’m giving you no fewer than 5 more Arduino starter kits. Two more from North American providers, and Three from European providers. All different, and all cool. We’ll see if we can get a good list to help folks out.

Posted on July 16, 2009 at 8:45 am 34 Comments

This post is filed under Hobby, Useful and tagged Arduino, Electronics.