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.

Specifics about this tutorial:

There are a couple of things you should know going into this. First, I’m not going to teach you everything about EAGLE. EAGLE is a complex program, and it’s pretty awesome. There’s no way I could cover it all. Second, this tutorial came about as a way of trying to get more people into my local PCB order. We try to fill up our panels so we can get one out every 2-4 weeks, and we recently had to switch production houses. As a result, this tutorial doesn’t have any info on etching your own PCB, just on getting the Gerber files out. So come check out our PCB order, because it’s awesome. Lastly, for the sake of simplification, we’re going to make a board that uses only parts in the SparkFun Library. This is because I don’t want to try to teach you how to make parts on top of everything else we’re going to be doing. It’ll just be easier this way, I promise. Okay, one more thing: I assume you know how to use your computer. This isn’t going to be a “how to use your mouse” tutorial. I’m gonna go with some things that are EAGLE specific, but you need to know basics. At this point, I’d be surprised to find someone who’s unfamiliar with computing, but has a strong enough interest in electronics to be to the point of designing their own PCB.

Things you will need:

You’re gonna need these things before you get started.

• An idea for your shield – I can’t help you with this one.
• A copy of CadSoft’s EAGLE program – for laying out your PCB
• A copy of the SparkFun EAGLE library – for the components.
• Your preferred Fab house’s Design Rules – Our PCB order rules are here.
• An EAGLE CAM job for separating out Gerber files. Here’s ours.

After you download and install EAGLE, download and extract the Sparkfun library. You should get a file called “Sparkfun.lbr”. This is an Eagle Library made by SparkFun Electronics. I like this library because it has a wide variety of components and reliable footprints. (Footprints are the measurements for parts that end up on your printed circuit board, and it is absolutely crucial that they’re correct.) One advantage of the SparkFun library is that everything in it licensed under the Creative Commons 3.0 Share-alike license. This means you can use it commercially, so long as you share any adaptations your create. Another library I highly recommend (but is not necessary for this tutorial) is Adafruit Industry’s Eagle Library.

Once you have the Sparkfun.lbr, copy it into the “lbr” directory in the directory EAGLE is installed in.

Let’s Make a Schematic:

I told you I couldn’t help you with your shield idea. That’s not entirely true. Since talking in the abstract all day is a pain the neck, we’re going to make a simple shield that does a few simple things. Our shield is going to light up lights, and connect to sensors.

First thing we need to do is make a new project. Open up EAGLE from wherever you installed it, and you should get a window that looks a little like this:

Click on the File menu, hover over new, and when the sub-menu pops up, choose “project”

You now should have a new project folder under the projects heading in the control panel window. Go ahead and give it a name – I chose “New Arduino Shield”, but you can do whatever you want. There won’t be anything in the project right now, so let’s add something. Select your new project folder, and then click on the file menu, go to ‘new’ and choose “schematic”.

You’ll get a window that looks like this:

Your schematic is the blueprint for your circuit. It describes what is connected to what, and how. It does not describe what the PCB will look like. Don’t worry too much about how your schematic goes together. The important parts are to make sure the schematic layout is simple, and readable.

We need to get some parts in there. Namely, we’re going to want some terminal blocks, some LEDs and some resistors. First though, let’s add the Arduino pins themselves. You’ll want to select the “Add a Part” Button on the left hand side of the window. It looks a little like a plug with a pointer on it. It’s this one:

That will bring up a dialog called “ADD”. On the left-hand side of this window is a list of all the libraries that EAGLE has access to. The right-hand side shows information about the item in the left-hand side.

You’ll want to find the SparkFun item in the list. (As a side note, this list isn’t quite presented in alphabetical order. The methodology here puts all capital letters ahead of the lower-case ones. The list goes from A-Z, then from a-z.) Choose the SparkFun item, and click on the plus sign to expand it. If you don’t see any items in the left-hand side, go to the library menu and click on ‘use’. This will bring up a list of EAGLE libraries, and you can select the Sparkfun library.

Scroll down until you find the item called “ARDUINO_SHIELD” and expand it. In here you’ll find a few different versions of the Arduino layout. Schematically, they’re all the same, but on the PCB side (in EAGLE parlance, this is called the “device”) there are a few different variations. You can click through the different shield options to see what the device footprint looks like. I prefer the ARDUINO_SHIELDNO_SLK, because I can worry about making my own board shape rather than relying on the Arduino shape.

Once you click “Ok” the dialog will disappear and your pointer will have a schematic circuit attach to it (in EAGLE’s language, this is called the “Package”). Figure out a place to put it down and click your left mouse button. EAGLE will set down the package. You’ll still have a copy attached to your pointer, so hit ESC on your keyboard a couple of times to get to your window again. You should now have something that looks a little like this:

Click on the “add a part” button again, and this time, go hunting for a resistor. There is a sub-heading called “RESISTOR”. Under it, the most appropriate part is called “RESISTORPTH1″. When you click on it, the schematic package and the device footprint will be shown.

Click okay, and put down 6 of these guys. We’re going to put our LEDs on the PWM pins in the Arduino so we can control brightness (Note: You can actually pull off PWM on any pin on the Arduino, but it has to be done in software. We’re gonna ignore that for the moment.) Lay down the resistors just a little bit away from the Arduino package,

With the Resistors down, let’s put down some LEDs now. Click on the “Add a Part” button again and find the LED heading. In there, select the LED5MM Package, and click okay. Now you want to lay these out. It’s important that we put them the right direction. You can remember which side is which with a simple mnemonic device: A is for Anode. That is, the end of the LED with the arrow is the Anode. Another easy thing to remember is that the side with the line, is the Cathode. That line (|) turns sideways and becomes a negative symbol (-) or ground.

You should now have a schematic that looks something like this:

Now, for our shield we also want to throw in a way to easily connect some inputs, namely sensors. The easiest way (In my opinion) to do this non-permanently is to implement a terminal block. Terminal blocks are those things you can screw, clip, or lock wires into place. The connectors are conductive so pushing the wire in makes it part of the circuit. We’re going to add one terminal for each of the Analog inputs. Terminals come in blocks, and we’re going to use 3-point terminal blocks. Most often these come in 3.5mm pitch (3.5mm between the posts). Once again, click on the Add A Part button, and head on down to the “M”s

You’ll find under the M03 heading a series of parts that are 3-point connectors. We want the M03SCREW (Alternatively, if you want you can use the M03SCREW_LOCK – This is the same part, but the holes are just a tad wide apart. They make the part stay in place more easily when you flip the board to solder the pins.) As we have 6 analog pins, we’re going to put a pair of them on the schematic.

For the convenience, we’re going to throw in a power terminal. This will just give us screw access to the 5v line and the Gnd. A 2-point terminal block is a lot like the 3-point one we just added. It’s listed under the M02 heading in the SparkFun library, called M023.5MM. You’re an old-pro at this by now. Stick it in, and you should have something like this:

Okay, we finally have all the parts we want. Let’s wire up this thing!

You would think that you want to use the “wire” tool to draw connections between components. You do not. You want to use the “Net” button. The net button is a little tidier than the wire button, does things right, and makes everything better. The Net tool button looks like this:

Select it. (Even though it looks like it, it’s not grayed out. Also, don’t confuse it with the button immediately next to it called “Bus”)  We want to draw lines between the PWM pins on the Arduino to the resistors. The PWM pins are marked by a small asterisk (*) on the chip. They are D3, D5, D6, D9, D10, and D11. When you click on the wire, it starts another segment. Start at the pin on the Arduino, and click. You should now be dragging a line. Click again to create another segment. When you’ve gotten to where you want to end, hit Esc, or Triple click. This will stop the line. Do this for all 6 PWN pins and you should have something like this:

Now attach each resistor to it’s associated LED. You should now now have this:

Now let’s attach the terminal blocks. Everything should go in order, except for the power block. Because of the way the pins are setup on the device, we want to pull the bottom most ground pin from the Arduino and the 5v line. When you’re done, you should have something that looks like this:

We’re almost finished. We just need to complete our circuit to make everything work right. To do this, we need to run a ground line over to the LEDs.  Grab the wire tool again and draw a line from the top GND line on the Arduino and carry it around to the side with the LEDs. Why the top GND line? Well, the way that the schematic translates to the board later, puts one of the GND pins on the side with the digital pins, while the other two are on the side with the analog pins. So this is for convenience.

Now connect each LED to the ground line.

That’s it! We’re done with the Schematic and we can move onto producing the PCB. Be sure at this point (if you haven’t already) to save your schematic. You never know when something will go wrong and take away all your hard work. You may want to try laying out the whole thing over again, just for the sake of doing it. Going through the process a few times will really help you get a feeling for EAGLE’s quirks and the processes in it.

Making the Board:

Now the fun part! I call this the fun part because I enjoy the process of figuring out how to put together the circuit in a way that makes sense. With an Arduino Shield, there are a couple of things already solved for you: 1) You don’t really have to worry about Orientation, the shield is only going to plug in one way. 2) A lot of your layout is already fixed (This can be a mixed blessing though.)

At the top of the window, you’re going to see a button that has two things on it. The button is called the ‘board’ button (in the schematic window) It has a symbol on it that looks like a plug (actually, it looks like a AND gate, but if you’re not familiar with electronics schematics at that level, it’ll probably look like a two-pronged plug) The other symbol looks like a 6-pin IC. The button looks like this:

When you click on it, you will probably get a warning that looks like this:

Click “yes” and it will open up a window like this:

We need to move all of those parts into that white square. Click on the “group” tool (this is the dotted square)

And click and drag around all the parts.

This should highlight all the parts. Now you need to click on the “move” button. It’s the one that looks like a cross with arrows on each end:

And right click on one of the parts. This will bring up a long list of items.

Click on “move group” should attach the whole group of components to your pointer. You want to move all of these things inside the white box. When you’ve done that, you should something something like this:

Before we continue, we’re going to turn on the grid. You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, but when you get to more complex boards, you’re going to really want to use the grid. It is absolutely crucial in PCB design. To begin, click on the Grid button in the upper left hand corner:

This will bring up a dialog. You’re welcome to set it to whatever you like and you might want to mess around with it to get a feeling for what it can do. I like to work in 0.1 inches as it’s the most common header in the US. Additionally, there’s an ‘Alt’ setting which produces a secondary grid you can work with. I usually set it to 1mm because that’s a common measurement as well.

Once you click okay, you’ll get a space that looks like this:

If you don’t like the size of the grid, you can certainly change it. I’m going to turn off my grid because it can be a bit distracting. This doesn’t mean that the grid is actually gone, just that it’s not displayed. When I get to positioning the components, it can be useful to have. Do whatever works best for you.

When I’m making an Arduino shield, I prefer to have it oriented the same way as the Arduino itself. That is, the top is viewed either as the side with the USB connector, or the side with the digital pins. For whatever reason, when SparkFun put together their Arduino component in EAGLE, they make the component default to a position with the digital pins on the left-hand side. In order to make it easier to work with, I rotate the whole thing. EAGLE makes this easy because whether it’s up or down, the names and values remain upright and readable. At this point, I’d tell you to use the rotate tool, but for whatever reason, I can’t get it to work properly here.

The method I use to rotate components is to choose the ‘move’ tool, click on the component, and then right click. As you right-click, the component you’re using will rotate counter-clockwise. So now you should have something that looks like this:

Now you’re going to want to begin placing components. This is largely up to you, and I’m not going to walk you through it step by step. You’ll see my solution below. Basically, move these components around until they make sense in their layout. The yellow lines (“air wires”) represent how the components are connected, and to what. The simpler the path is, the easier it will be to understand later. Try to keep them as straight forward as possible. Don’t worry if they overlap, that will all be solved in a moment.

See what I mean? Easy to read!

I should note here that most terminal blocks are designed to fit right up against each other, This is why I’ve placed the blocks so close. The particular ones that SparkFun sells actually interlock. You’ll want to make sure you properly line them up so the footprints are marked together. Because the footprints are tightly controlled, it can be a little difficult to position them correctly. These terminals IMO, are a little wonky, so here’s the simple solution: Put the 3-point terminals at 15mm and 26.6mm. I think there might be an error in the library with the 2-pin terminals. This image shows the block right next to the 3-pin terminal, but I don’t believe it will actually fit. If you choose to get this board produced, please fix the spacing or the part in the library.

You may want to resize your outline at this point as well. This is easy. Just take the corners of the outline and drag them to a size that works for you.

Now we want to take care of the routes. You could use the “Auto-route” button if you wanted to, but I prefer to do my trace-routing by hand. Because of that, it takes a little longer, but usually ends up neater in my opinion. First you’ll want to click on the “Ratsnest” button. This button takes all these little yellow lines that connect your circuit and moves them around to make things a little simpler.

Clicking that will recalculate the mess into this:

Now click on the Route Button

Now find one of the yellow airwires that connects to the ground line.Click on it, and you’ll start to draw a route. Don’t worry about crossing any of the yellow lines yet, we’ll take care of that in a minute. What you’ll find is that EAGLE automatically continues your line. As the LED’s ground line connects all of the LEDs together, we can just follow it around the board. Now let’s do it again with the lines coming from the 6 analog pins. Draw 6 lines with the route tool. You may have to get a little creative in how you draw the lines so they don’t connect with each other or other pads. Again, at this point don’t worry about crossing the yellow air wires just yet. When you’re done, you should have something like this.

Okay. We’ve got 7 lines we still need to route, and space is getting pretty tight. What are we going to do? Fortunately, we have more than one side of the board to route on! In the upper left hand corner, when the route tool is selected, you’ll see a drop down menu. Currently it should say “Bottom” (meaning the bottom of the board) but if you click on it, you are able to select “Top”\

You have to be a little careful because there’s less room on the top for routing than on the bottom, but with some creativity you can make it work. I recommend you take advantage of the gaps created by the resistors to take a route over to the other side.

If it’s kind of hard to see, here’s a picture without the text that make show the routes a little better.

Okay. We’re almost done. We want to put a couple of things on the silkscreen, so we know what to plug in to the terminal blocks. This part is easy. Click on the Text button (The “T”). Type what you want, and place it. By hitting escape, you’ll get the dialog box again, and you’ll be able to place another thing. You might also want to fill in any blank space you have (or not) I like to put in something identifying, just for fun.

So here we are. We have completed our circuit and we’re ready to go! We’re almost finished (again). All we have to do is turn this sucker into Gerber files and shoot them off to the fab house.

Gerber? Isn’t that baby food?

Yup, Gerber is a brand of baby food, but it’s also the common name of the files you send to a manufacturer so they know what to do to make your board. It was initially created by a company called Gerber Systems Corporation. They used it to drive a photo-plotter. These days it’s properly referred to as RS-274X. There are lots of different “layers” in a gerber file, but the common ones you come across are as follows:

• Top-Silkscreen – This usually shows your documentation… part placement and footprints
• Mask Top – This shows the machine where not to put soldermask, like the pads you’ll be soldering onto
• Mask Bottom – Same as above, for the reverse.
• Top Copper – This shows where the machine should leave copper so your circuit connects
• Bottom Copper – Same as above for the other side.
• Excellon Drill – This is the file that tells the router where to go through your PCB
• Outline – Your board outline.

Allright, enough talk. Let’s do this.

First we need to run electrical and design checks. These make sure that nothing is electrically wrong with our design and that our fab house can actually produce it. Note: This doesn’t mean your design will work. It only means that EAGLE doesn’t see electric circuits crossing paths.

Click on the electrical check tool:

and it should bring up the ERC errors page. In this page there are a lot of warnings. Here it’s just telling us that there aren’t any values listed. I intentionally did that because I figured that someone may want to put their components. Who knows how big or how bright you want those LEDs. I’m not gonna tie you down.

The way we take care of these is simply click on “Approve” for each one. Be careful how you do this, you don’t want to approve something that is wrong.

Next we’ll run the design rule check. Click on the design rule button

Since EAGLE doesn’t know who’s rules you want to play by, you’ll have to choose a design rule file, or a .dru. I use our PCB order rules, which can be downloaded at the top. Click on the “Load” button, and choose your file.

You’ll get the design rule check screen. Just press the “check” button.

Uh-oh. Looks like I wasn’t paying close enough attention. There’s an overlap in the circuit layout. That is to say that something on my board is connecting in a way that is not connected on my schematic. Fortunately you don’t have to hunt around for it. EAGLE draws a nice little box around the area in question.

In this case, it looks like I ran my GND line right through one of the holes where the VCC line comes in. The way we fix this is “rip-up” the line and redraw it. The Rip-up tool looks like this:

All you have to do is click on the offending line, and then select the routing tool again an lay it down in a functional manner.

Okay, now that we’ve fixed that, we run the Design rule check again…

And it comes back good! Hooray!

Now we can finally produce those Gerber files. click on the CAM processor button

and it will open up the CAM processor Window (funny how that works.) We want to use a specific CAM job, so we have to go to File->Open->Job…

Choose your cam job, and you should get an updated CAM processor window:

The only adjustment I recommend here is that you additionally select tDocu-51 on the Silkscreen-CMP layer. This will make sure that the Arduino Silkscreen stuff ends up in the silkscreen with the rest of our materials. When you’re ready, press the “Process Job” button. EAGLE will output the gerber files and output them into your project directory. EAGLE will have produced both .ger files and .gpi files. The gpi files simply contain information about the ger files, and are unnecessary.

If you want, you can see what these files look like by going over to circuitpeople.com and loading them up. It’s nice and simple. No signups, no ads. Just an easy way to view your gerbers. I highly recommend you do check your work to make sure it looks the way you want it to. I have gotten back boards that didn’t have everything on the silkscreen layer that I expected them to. Here’s how a couple of the gerbers looked from this project. On the left is the top-copper gerber, and the right is the top-silkscreen.

That’s it! You’re finished. Zip ‘em up and send them off to your board house, or if you want it to be easy for yourself. Send them off to Laen, and he’ll include them in our monthly PCB order! I guarantee you, it’s hard to beat $5/sq in. for 3 boards. The turn around time is a little more than a week from send off date. And they don’t go out to China. (Judge for yourselves if that’s a good thing. I can go either way.)

If you’d like to look at the files I made while doing this, they are on the download page.

So there you have it. Make a circuit, order it, and in about a week-and-a-half, you get something that looks like this. If you need some help, you can usually find me during the week as sircastor on IRC on the #dorkbot channel or you can email me!

Anyway, the group also does a monthly PCB order. You make your design, send it off to Laen, who manages all this, and he sends it off to a PCB fab house out in Colorado. This all for $5/square inch and you get 3 of your design.

I’d been toying with the idea of an Arduino shield that mixes the best parts of the prototyping shields I’ve seen. I also wanted a board that I could plug several servos into for servo control. What I ended up with was the “Arduino Servo-Proto-Shield”. You may have seen the rendered version in my last post.

The shield breaks out all of the 28 pins into 3.5mm screw terminal blocks. It also has long-tail female headers for additional shield mounting. The 12 digital pins (2 through 13) are broken out into Servo-motor headers. For fun I threw in some 0.1″ vias if I want to add some permanent circuit.

Unfortunately, I made one minor mistake in my design. My 2-terminal blocks had the wrong drill size set for the hole, as a result, they’re just a bit too small to accomadate the terminal blocks. So unfortunately the breakout for my GND, Aref, and Serial communication is out of commission until I find a way to shave down the posts on the terminal blocks.

I soldered it this evening and plugged it into my Arduino. It looks good, and I’ve tested all the connections – they all work fine. I just have to make this do something now! Any of you who read this and have an interest: What do you think could be improved? I’m looking for ideas and thoughts to make this a better shield.

Several months back when SparkFun announced Free Day, a few friends of mine got a bit of a glimmer in our eyes. We’ve been intrigued by the premise of the RepRap printer for some time, but in generally felt out of reach. The distance was measured by a number of things, including money, and the theory was that we’d be able to get some free stuff out of SparkFun to help with the cost. We quickly realized that SparkFun didn’t sell much that we actually needed (and you know how it turned out anyway.) So we decided to embark on the journey anyway. Isaac decided to take on the electronics and the extruder, while I decided to handle the cartesian robot.

“What is a cartesian robot?” you say. Well, it’s a robot whose job is to move something around in three-dimensional space. In the case of the RepRap, it’s a device called and extruder that takes plastic filament and melts it down to a liquid form so it can be laid out in some manner kind of like a hot glue gun. So if you can lay down melted plastic, move around the source of that melted plastic, you can build an object layer by layer.

Enter the McWire Cartesian robot. A few years back a guy named Tom McWire came up with a pretty neat design for a 3-axis CNC machine. It was small, built on commonly available parts, and well documented. Then, a guy named Zach Smith adapted the design for use as a RepRap. A couple of months ago, I decided to build one.

And there it is! My biggest frustration I think was the lack of several things when it came down to the construction. A few of my complaints:

No measurements for the design anywhere.
Acrylic was recommended, but not easy to obtain or DIY.
The lead of the design has since abandoned it for greener pastures
The design is overly-complicated for what the project is trying to accomplish.
Some things about the design don’t make sense

A lot of these things are carryovers from Tom Mcwire’s original design. For him, as near as I can tell, the decisions were ones of “Well, I have this stuff….” which is very easy for a guy who has a shop full of materials to use. For a person who needs a parts list, this becomes a very bad idea. Mostly because a person who goes out an buys parts for a project expects the project to make sense from a purchasing standpoint. This is rarely the case where someone is making something from materials they have. Utility is more important than the material itself. Thus, the over complicated machine.

Early construction

I’ve been working with others within the RepRap community to develop a good official replacement for the McWire. Right now we’re focusing on an easily-constructed design nicknamed “Wolfstrap” after it’s first builder who’s name is Wolfgang. This design hopes to take into account more common materials, simpler-design, and fewer proprietary concepts. Beyond the pictures you can find here, I’ve put together a model in SketchUp.

Was building the McWire fun? Sure. I had some fun, and I had some really irritating moments. I’m glad I did it, and I’m also glad I’m done with it.

There’s a major downside of live Christmas Trees: Watering. I know, it’s really not a huge deal, but if you fail to properly water your tree, you end up with a dry, ugly, failing tree a week before Christmas. We don’t want that, so I’m very interested in keeping the tree moisturized. It presents a couple of problems: 1) You need to remember to water the tree   2) You need to get under the tree to water it. As I said before, this tree is a behemoth. We didn’t trim the bottom branches much, but even if we had, sliding under on your tummy and precariously balancing your pitcher to get water in the stand is not an easy feat.

The Solution: The distance-tree-waterer.

I didn’t invent this idea, and I’m certainly not the first to come up with it. I do take a little pride in saying that I thought of it before I went out to the internet to find it. However, I didn’t think of sticking the water-bucket under a present-shaped box.

Okay wait, tell me what’s going on here…

Allright. So I mentioned that I didn’t want to crawl under that big ol’ tree to pour water in it. Well, there’s this magical physics trick that allows you to move water from one place to another. It’s called a Siphon. Water likes to go downwards. You’ve seen this in streams that flow off mountains. Gravity pulls water in a certain direction, and then, so long as their is a difference in equity of two bodies of water, it will continue to pull more water along with it.

So the trick here, is that the bucket hidden behind the present facade has a water level that’s higher than that of the water in the tree stand. I started the water moving by sucking it through a length of tubing. So long as the water in the gift/reservoir is a higher level than the treestand, water will flow. When the tree stand equals the reservoir, the water stops flowing. The water will stay neutral until the reservoir is filled back up.

All in all, this project took me about 45 minutes to put together. 10 minutes to setup the actual mechanism, and an additional 35 to get a nice facade put together so it didn’t look like I had a random bucket of water sitting on the floor. The “Present” is made of 3 sides of  cardboard, and a top which goes over them. It’s wrapped in regular wrapping paper. On either side of the water line, there’s a short length of copper wire (what I had available at the time) that serves as a clip to hold the line in a particular position. As the system is dependent on the flow of water, we don’t want these tubes falling out and flooding the living room.

So far the system is a resounding success. I haven’t had to crawl under the tree or even at this point refill the water. As the tree draws water, the tree stand will refill from the reservoir. I just need to put water in as the reservoir gets closer to empty.

My dad asked me a few months ago about e-Book readers. He had a stroke a few years ago and doesn’t have great control of his left hand. Books can be a bit difficult for him. I whole-heartedly recommended the Kindle because I thought it was amazing. It still is to some degree, but Last Friday the Kindle book fiasco happened. You’ve probably heard the story: Amazon found out that one of the books they were selling wasn’t properly licensed, so they yanked it from the store and from every single Kindle. It’s an invasion of privacy, personal space, and property.

Suffice it to say, It would take a bit of a miracle for me to buy a Kindle. Amazon’s CEO, JEff Bezos, issued an apology, but I echo the comments in response to that. It’s great that you recognize it was a mistake, but what are you going to do about it? Where’s the guarantee that you’re not going to play reading police again?

Yesterday, My wife and I went down to the Mall to the Sony store (Which is called Sony Style for reasons I cannot fathom) to check out their eReader. It’s a 2008 device, compared to the Kindle 2 which is just a few months old, and it has a few shortcomings. The reading library available to it is significantly smaller than Amazon’s and there’s no wireless option… at all. Sure, I can’t go out and buy books wirelessly, but also no one can come in and take books wirelessly. There’s also no annotation options. If I want to make notes about books, I’m going to have to do it on paper.

Still, I kind of want one. I like the technology, and I doubt I’m going to give the Kindle another shot. Still, I think we’re on the eve of a bigger tech war than it seems right now. Several days back, Barnes & Noble announced a deal with a company called Plastic Logic, to sell books in connection to that device. Plastic Logic expects to release their reader towards the end of this year, or early next year. I also expect Sony to update their reader pretty soon, or they’re going to start looking like their standing still. Hykel said she might buy me a reader for Christmas. If I get enough fun money before then, I might buy one myself…

I’m hoping that Amazon’s fumble, and the introduction of Plastic Logic’s device will spur Sony to update their reader to new heights. If there’s one thing I like, it’s competition. Competition drives products to be better, and benefits the consumer.

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.

Disclaimers: I wrote this over two weeks. I tried my best to make it look nice, and be readable. Sorry if it’s not. Also, I started out with 4 European provides, but only ended up with 3. They’re all actually from the UK. I hope that doesn’t cheese anyone off. Anyway, on with it all.

First, let me say that looking at some of these kits, it’s clear that “Starter” doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. To some, it means “Beginner”, to others it means “Introductory”. The difference is that some kits are put together for the person who’s not familiar with Arduino and how it works. Other kits are built to get you up and running with an Arduino. They give you lots to work with, cool things to do, but not the know-how or “already have”-ness that you get from being an Electronics hobbiest. I’m not going to differentiate here, except in the conclusion, where I’ll lay out which kits seem to fall into which category.

Kits are listed by their providers, as they’re pretty much all called “Arduino Starter Kit”; Providers are in alphabetical order…

All kits contain an Arduino Duemilanove board with an ATMega328 unless otherwise noted.

Cool Components

The Cool Components starter kit is a neat looking kit, and has a few surprises in it. Forgive me for the pun, it definitely has some cool components in it. It weighs in at $80.10 (US), They’re based in the UK though, so you’re probably expecting something in pounds: £48.22 is the magic number.

1 x USB cable – This is kind of a given… Looks to be 3′ from the picture.

2 x Mini breadboards - I expected 1, two sweetens the deal here. You can either work on two small projects, or have on projects separated into sections. I like this.

1 x Male & Female Jumper Leads - I think the 1x refers to “1 pack of jumpers”  The photo looks to have about 10 of them. While Male jumpers are fantastic, I’m not sure how Female jumpers are going to be put to use here. You could connect the directly to the sensors, but then you’ll still have to use Male jumpers to connect them the Arduino, or to the Breadboard.

6 x LEDs (mix of red, green, yellow) – A good mix of LEDs, nothing special though.

2 x 15 degree Tilt Switches - This is a very cool addition, and a slightly unexpected one. I’d love to play with some tilt-switches, but I kind of wonder why these were thrown in…

Resistors (220, 10k, 200k Ohm – 5 each) – Always good to have a mix of resistors to work with, especially if you’re giving people breadboards to plug stuff into.

2 x 1N4007 Diode – You will thank your lucky stars when you don’t fry a valuable component because the current decided to go the other way. Diodes are nice to have…

4 x BC547 NPN Transistors – Transistors are the basis of modern electronics. They are in everything, including quite a few in that Arduino up there. While they’re definitely cool, I’m not sure about their inclusion here. Most of what you do with transistors can be easily accomplished with Arduino programming, and most projects aren’t going to be large enough or complex enough to encourage the use of Transistors. That said, they’re a basic component of learning electronics, so why not?

2 x Opto-isolators – I didn’t know what an Opto-isolator was until a few minutes ago. It’s a little IC that has an LED (InfraRed) and a little photodetector (or light sensor) that’s all wrapped in a light-tight housing. You can use them to eliminate electrical noise or to transmit signals between different voltages.

1 x Piezo buzzer - Make noise! Because you can! A great little addition, because it’s so easy to use, and so obnoxious.

The Cool Components package is cool, but seems to be suffering from a kind of identity crisis. Is it a beginners electronics package, or a beginner’s Arduino package? The price feels a little high to me, but I’m not familiar enough with UK electronics economy to tell. It turns out Cool Components doesn’t sell individually a lot of the components listed in the kit, so I couldn’t get a very accurate price for individual parts. My guestimate comes to about £44.00, which is less than they sell the kit for…

EarthShine Design

Freeduino Board (100% Arduino Compatible Clone) – “What does that mean!?!” You say… It means that your Arduino is not an official Arduino board, but instead, a compatible board. It doesn’t say on the site, but I’m guessing they give you this board, instead of this one. What does that mean for you? It means your board will be orange instead of blue. The Freeduino board is 100% compatible with all hardware and software for the Arduino. The people who created Arduino intended the design to work like that. There’s a whole bunch of different Arduino-compatible boards out there. Anyway, the point of all this is: Don’t shy away from this because it’s not an official Arduino board. You can still do everything you want with zero problems.

USB A to B Cable – Don’t know how long. Expect 3′ to be on the safe side.

“The Complete Beginners Guide to the Arduino” eBook - According to the listing, this book has more than a dozen projects for you to do with your new Arduino. Smart to make it an eBook. Additionally, there are links to code provided. Note: Mike, who runs Earthshine Design and is very active in the Arduino Community, has decided to release this book freely. This is way cool as it provides a learning opportunity not limited to only those who buy the kit. I think this is a great way to promote Earthshine and provide something for the community. You can get the book here.

9v DC Power Supply (UK Socket) – A UK plug to get the power you need for your Arduino.

Full Size (700 tie points) Breadboard – This is a welcome addition. A full size breadboard. I like the mini-boards, but it’s nice to know there’s someone out there considering what you’re trying to do.

Red Diffused, Green Diffused, Yellow Diffused, Red, Green, Blue LEDs (10 each) – Yeah, that’s 60 LEDs right there. The latter 3 are clear.

100, 150, 240, 470, 1k, 1k5, 1M Ohm resistors (10 each) - For someone getting started (as I’m sure I mentioned before), having a good selection of resistors is essential. I’m glad to see the wide range.

5 Tactile Switches – Buttons!

74HC595 Shift Register IC’s (3) – Shift registers are a good way to multiply pins you don’t have. You can turn 8 pins into just 3, saving you 5 pins to use else where. Great if you’re working with a component that takes a lot of pins (LCD screens for instance)

Turned Pin 16-Way IC Sockets (3) – So you don’t have to solder those Shift registers…

BC547B NPN Transistors (2) - A couple of transistors for amplifying or… something

TIP-120 NPN Transistor – I’m not sure about the inclusion of this, as I don’t really know the differ

8×8 Mini LED Dot Matrix Display – A nifty inclusion. The one they offer in their shop they note it’s easy to control via a shift register (included above)

LM35DT Temperature Sensor – Rises an falls in temperature could provide for some cool projects.

Light Dependent Resistor – Almost a given in a starter kit

4K7 Potentiometer – Another common item. Nice to have.

DC Motor – This one is a bit of a surprise to me, as A motor isn’t a common thing to include. It’s defintely a nice addition, but there’s no H-bridge in the kit for motor control. I don’t know the project they have in mind when they include this, don’t expect anything but basic on-off motor…

3-Way Terminal Block – This is a  block screw down posts to make it easy to connect and disconnect wires to an from connections. Useful during prototyping.

Piezoelectric Sounder – Make noise with this… but don’t plan on it being pretty.

75 Piece Molded-End Jumper Wire Kit – I think it goes without saying that you need wires.

Quality 7 Compartment Raaco Case – This is a great point of all of these kits. If you’re getting started in  electronics, you’ll quickly find that the random doodads that you’re picking up have nowhere to go in your house. Having a little case to stick them in is really indispensable.

This is a BIG kit. A lot bigger than what I was expecting for a starter kit. The strength of the kit lies in the projects that they give you to do. More than a dozen projects to learn with and the components that you need to complete them. I think as you go through these projects you’ll find that you’re learning the things that you need to make your own projects, and realize the things you’d like to build. The price for the kit is £49.99 or about $81.00 US. A parts breakdown, makes it more than £53.00 (Not all parts were available to price), so you do get a price break. However, it is a little high when you’re looking to get into the basics.

Hacktronics

Solderless Breadboard – A bit bigger than the kits reviewed so far, it’s nice to have what I’d call a “project breadboard”. It has room enough for an entire project, which I think would largely be

12  Flexible Wire Jumpers – All Male it looks like, which is good.

Red, Green, Blue & White (5 each) – LEDs are great fun. These are all diffused (they look like the color they give off)

330, 680, 1k, 4.7k, 10k Ohm Resistors (5 each) – A wide selection of resistors is great.

1  Tactile Push Button – Many of the cool things that you’ll want to do has to do with pressing buttons to get responses out of the Arduino.

1  USB Cable for programming and powering the board – From the picture, it looks to be a 6 foot cable.

This is a good kit for basic Arduino experimentation. You could make a few projects with LEDs that respond to a button-press. I don’t see a lot of flexibility beyond that though. The sells for $39.85. Parts breakdown total is $49.25 (The breadboard in the kit doesn’t appear to be for sale on the site, so I substituted the closest similar…)

MakerShed

MakerShed is the store corner of Make Magazine, and a way for them to provide parts and materials for the projects they show off in the magazine. When I started writing this I was actually looking at the kit they’re retiring. They’ve since replaced it with 3 kits for different needs: The Arduino Projects Pack, the Advanced Arduino Starter Kit, and this one – the Getting Started with Arduino Kit. If you get a chance, I recommend you look at all three as they vary to suit needs.

Getting Started with Arduino book – I have a copy of this book myself, though I got it long after I’d gotten started with my Arduino. It’s a good little book that covers history, and explains basic concepts of programming and electronics.

USB Cable – They don’t say, but the previous kit’s cable was 3 feet. I’d guess the same for this one.

1K & 10K Ohm Resistors (10 each) – A couple different values to meet your needs.

1 Tactile Switch – It’s a button.

1 Photoresistor – See the light! Or at least change resistance based on it.

2 Force Sensing Resistors - With these, you can sense force, like how heavy something might be, based on the force it’s pushing against one of these.

LEDs: 1 Red, 1 Green, 1 Superbright Blue, & 1 RGB (1 each) – A good mix of Colors. While I think I’d want a few more of each, I can’t really tell you why you’d need them. 4 LEDs is a good set for a starter package.

140 piece Jumper Wire Set – This is a lot of jumper wires! They are all Male-to-Male

Breadboard – Nothing is stated explicitly about this breadboard, but the picture for the thing seems to imply that it’s a pretty large one.

9V Battery Pack w/DC Plug – This is a nice extra to have. Giving you an easy option of powering your Arduino away from the computer. It’s not a necessity, and I’m not too fond of the external power supply, as it doesn’t give you the right voltage out of the 3v3 pin. Still nice to have. Also, you get a 9v Battery to go with it.

MakerShed’s kit is a good one for a beginner. If nothing else, the inclusion of the “Getting Started” book is a good move. All of the information in the book can be found online, but not all in the same place, and often not as well written. The kit has enough going for it that I would recommend it for someone actually entering the Arduino field for the first time. The  kit comes at $69.95, which is a little steep for a kit, but you’re getting some good stuff. Ala Carte, I estimate this stuff would probably run you about $90 give or take (not all components were available separately, so I had to guess at the costs.) In that light, it’s a very good deal.

Oomlout

Breadboard – A nicely sized Breadboard.

Acrylic Holder – As near as I can tell, this device holds your Arduino and Your breadboard together in a fashion that make it’s easy to work with the pair. If you’ve never worked with an Arduino before, it can be difficult to get your boards to cooperate in the same space. The Arduino isn’t heavy, and wires can provide a lot of tension.

75 Piece Jumper Wire Bundle – This looks to be the standard in most of the kits I’ve looked at, some offer more or less. I think 75 is good. I currently have 30 and I haven’t managed to use them all.

Printed 29 page Experimenter’s Guide & 11+1 Breadboard Layout Sheets – This is where I think this kit really shines. It comes not only with a book that gives you starting points and projects to work on, but it gives you overlays that will fit on the included breadboard. Copying a schematic can be difficult sometimes, especially for beginners. With this, you just place the sheet on the breadboard, and start sticking components through where they’re marked. For me, doing is worth more than just reading about, so this practice I expect will help beginners. I hope very much that the guide includes circuit schematics. This is a great tool to teach schematic reading.

USB Cable – I don’t know how long it is. When in doubt, expect 3ft.

Multi-compartment Plastic Storage Box – I kind of think every kit should have one of these, but really it’s probably more just the kits that are designed for beginners.

Red, Green (5mm), Red (10mm) LEDs (10 each) – A good selection.

Toy Motor – I’m gonna guess that this is a 3v3 motor, possibly 5v.

Mini Servo Motor – The first inclusion of a servo, I think this is more valuable than a DC motor. This is easier to control than a vanilla motor, and the libraries available for Arduino are solid.

8-Bit Shift Register – Glad to see this again, as a method of preserving pins for other uses.

Piezo Element – Hooray for obnoxious noise!

Pushbuttons (2) – Buttons are an absolute necessity.

Potentiometer 10K ohm – Adjustable Resistance is also a necessity in doing a lot of cool stuff. The pot they give you is big, but it’s nice to have a large knob to turn… The pots that I have right now need to be turned via screwdriver, and it’s a pain in the neck.

Photo Resistor – How bright is it?

Temperature Sensor (TMP36) How warm is it?

Relay – I think this is a very cool addition to the pack. A relay has been on my list of things to get for my Arduino for a while. Think of it as an electronically controlled switch. Setup a lamp, plug this inbetween, and you’ve got yourself a switch. If you’re willing to put in some effort, you can make that a web-enabled light switch

Transistors - Again, I think they have a plan for these. I don’t know that they belong in a beginner kit,  but if there’s a project utilizing them, it can be a good opportunity.

Resistors 560 Ohm (25) 2.2k Ohm (3), 10k Ohm (3) - You need a variety of these. I suspect the values they’ve given you apply in the pack.

Diodes - Keep your power going the right direction.

This kit is pretty dang awesome. While it doesn’t provide the same variety of sensors some of the others do, it’s an awesome kit for someone getting started with the Arduino and with Electronics in general. I would not recommend it for someone who already has some electronics background, as you’ll probably get several things you already have. This kit costs £55.00. As of this writing, that’s about $90.00 US. That’s not cheap, but you get so much with this kit, I can’t argue against it. Sold separately, I estimate this kit running about £50.00 or so, but that doesn’t include any estimate at the value of the printed instruction materials, so it’s probably about dead on. (Caveat: I do not live in the UK, I don’t have a lot of experience in pounds -> dollars exchange, so I might be way off.)

Oomlout also offers their kit in variations. You can buy it without the Arduino or without the Arduino and no project guide/breadboard layovers. I like the “levels” of kit available. I would have loved to be able to buy a kit minus the Arduino back when I first got one. I was so thrilled about getting the Arduino I didn’t think about other stuff I might need.

Thoughts

Initially, there were 6 kits that I was going to review in this second shot. I took too long though apparently. I checked tonight to do the last kit, and it was gone! According to the changelog, I’ve been working on this post for nearly two weeks. That’s really about a week more than I wanted to work on it. It’s been a bit slow going too, as copying, pasting, commenting, and formating is not fun, especially not when you have to do it 5 times. All the kits are good kits. I don’t know how to rank them really, They fall into their different places well, all fitting somewhere on the spectrum of “For total beginner” to “For someone who needs components and an Arduino.”

Let me start by splitting them into Europe and North America, mostly because that’s how people are going to order . First the remaining US kits:

When I looked at Sparkfun vs Adafruit’s kits, I found them to be sort of in that equal-but-opposite situation. As you may recall, The Sparkfun kit had a bit more variety to it. Adafruit’s kit was much more focused towards the person who didn’t have experience doing electronics. The two remaining kits are the MakerShed, and Hacktronics. The Hacktronics kit is, to me, about as barebones as you can get when it comes to an Arduino kit. Not too much included, but not too little either. It’ll give you a few things to mess around with if this is your first foray into Microcontroller programming. A button, some lights.

Makershed does a bit better. They include the Arduino Book, and a few more types of sensors. So we get a few things to play around with and some instructions on what to do. The book is a good choice because It not only gives you an overview of basic electronics, but also an overview of the Arduino itself. The ideas behind it and the goals of the project. It will get you in the right mode when you get going with your Arduino. All in all, I still favor Adafruit’s kit most. It provides the most complete experience.

On the European side, the kits I’ve looked at are pretty dang cool. My top choice is defintely the kit from Oomlout. They’ve put together a solid kit with lots of room for growth. As I said though, it’s spendy. The Cool Components kit gives you something to do, but not a lot. Like the Hacktronics kit, there’s nowhere to go but up. The Earthshine kit is HUGE and comes in just a bit under the Oomout. Both are strong kits, the thing that pushes it over the edge for me is those breadboard overlays. They’re just a really smart idea. That said, if you’re willing to play around with an Arduino, you probably don’t need a color-by-the-numbers concept. You can figure it out! You’re smart!

Okay… I’m sick of looking at Arduino Kits. I hope this guide is useful. If I recover from this exercise, I’ll put together a useful kind of table that compares things better. Good luck with your Arduino experiences. If you have questions, or whatever, leave a comment.

I have the classic Arduino “Blink” sketch loaded up to the Arduino. It goes through pin 13 and the close by Gnd pin. Those pins are connected to the mini-breadboard which has an IR LED connected to it. So when the LED would normally blink, the IR LED blinks. We dont’ see anything because we can’t see Infrared. Immediately across from the IR emitter, is the IR Detector. It is an Infrared PhotoDiode. This thing looks like and LED, and I think that was not the best decision. First, you must remember which is the detector and which is the emitter (I got my pair from Radio shack ) and secondly there is no marking which suggests that the detector is not simply a clear LED waiting to be turned on. Additionally, I think because the device is receiving light rather than sending it, this thing probably ought to look more like a LDR (Light Dependent Resistor)… maybe with a special marking somewhere? Bad Design Radio Shack… but it’s probably not your fault. You don’t make these things, other people make these things.

Anyway, the IR emitter blinks into the IR Detector. The Detector in this case acts as a switch. The more Infrared light that comes into it, the higher voltage it produces. We use that voltage to bridge between the Gnd, and a Green LED connected to the 3v3 pin on the Arduino. The Result? Blinking green light!

As expected, when you drape something between the emitter and the detector, the green light stops blinking. One thing I found though is that light can be sneaky. Initially, I placed a peice of cardboard (product packaging) between the emitter and detector and the light didn’t stop blinking, it just blinked dimmer. At first I thought the light was somehow getting through the cardboard… which would have been a superman-feat of physics. In reality, the light was bouncing down from the cardboard (which was a bit reflective) and then bouncing up off the breadboard to the detector. As not all of the light was making it, the detector wasn’t creating as much voltage.

It’s pleasant

If you don’t know already, I am a huge fan of the Arduino. Arduino is the name of Microcontroller kit. It’s open source, easy to learn, and a great way to get into electronics/physical computing. This week, one of my favorite Electronics companies, SparkFun Electronics released an “Arduino Starter Kit”. Another one of my favorite Electronics companies, Adafruit Industries, released their own “Arduino Starter Pack” quite a while back. I thought I’d take a look a little more closely at what you get…

First off, I haven’t purchased either of these. I already have an Arduino, and a bunch of associated components to use with it. I don’t need either of these because, for the most part, I already have both of them, sans an extra Arduino (Or the newest model for that matter). Hopefully reading this will give anyone an idea of which kit would be better for who.

I’m going to start out with the Adafruit package, because Alphabetically it’s first and the pack came out first:

Adafruit Industries Arduino Starter Pack

Arduino Duemilanove w/ATMega328 – This is the most recent model of Arduino, with the most recent Micro. I think the only thing to mention here is the LadyAda (Limor Fried) has developed a special Arduino Bootloader that works a little faster on bootup than the stock Arduino Bootloader. This comes pre-burned onto the chip, so if you want it, you’ve got it.

3′ USB A-B cable - I can’t believe you don’t have one of these already, but if you do it’s probably currently connected to a printer. It’s nice to have one dedicated for programming. There is also the possibility that you don’t have one. It makes sense to include one because this is a Starter pack. I appreciate they don’t make assumptions.

Protoshield Kit - This is an awesome thing to include in the starter pack. Why? Because if you’re getting to know micro-controllers, my guess is that you’re also really diving into electronics for the first time. I think the days of going from simple analog logic to Micros is gone. I think it happens the other way around. At any rate, this kit gives you some experience soldering, polarity, and a few other things that will help you in learning and understanding your Arduino. Also, coupled with the mini-breadboard it makes for a great prototyping.development tool.

9v Regulated DC adapter and 9v Battery Case w/2.1mm plug – These are both great side-items to have. When I got my Arduino, I only had the option of getting power from the USB cable because I didn’t have a 2.1mm barrel plug sitting around to supply power (Actually, I may have, but I didn’t know early on) I bought my own AC adapter from Adafruit. It works great. I will give you two warnings though:

1. When supplied from a source other than the USB cable, the 3.3v pin will supply more than 3.3 volts. My 5v pin supplied more than 5v. More information is available on the Duemilanove Hardware Page
2. Your Arduino will get hot!

Bunch of cool components! - These are the kinds of things I wish were available at every corner store, but are unfortuantely not. Some of them can be picked up at Radio Shack, but not as conveniently and probably without the helpful explanation.

• 1k and 10k Potentiometers - Great for experimenting with resistance. 2 commonly used values.
• 2 Push-buttons – For when you want to interact with your Arduino
• 5 Red Diffused LEDs +  3 LEDs in different colors – 5 diffused (red looking) red LEDs. Also, Because Red get boring, you also get clear Red, Green, and Blue. This is nice because it helps to have different colors for association.
• 100 ohm, 1K ohm, and 10K ohm – One of the most frustrating things starting out in Electronics is realizing you need resistors of values you don’t have, and it’s not really clear what values you ought to get early on. 5 each so you have room to breath in your project.
• Cds photocell – aka Photoresistor. Shoot light into it, it becomes less resistant.

A whole heck of a lot of Jumper wires – I was really surprised at the number of wires that Adafruit includes in their pack here. 75! That’s a LOT of connections for you to make before you run out.

SparkFun Electronics Arduino Starter Kit

Arduino Duemilanove w/ATMega328 – The base of the kit, comes ready to go with the chip burned with the bootloader.

6′ USB A – B cable – So you have what you need to get started. Great for Power too. The length here is nice.

Red Mini-Breadboard – So you have something to plug stuff into. These are great. I have a blue one which I’m using to connect with a component. You get one in SparkFun’s signature Red.

Jumper Wires – As near as I can tell, you get 20 of these, in 5 assorted colors. From experience, I can tell you these are great. They are around 6 inches (155mm according to them).

Piezo Vibration Sensor – So you know when the Phat Beats are being dropped. It senses vibrations like those put out by music, or movement. You could build a project that you would sense a T-Rex approaching, instead of having to rely on a cup of water precariously placed on your dashboard.

Photocell – A Cds light-dependant resistor. How bright is it? Now you can know. (Albeit, rather Ambiguously)

LEDs – It doesn’t say explicitly on the website, but from the picture, it looks like you get 3. Two color-diffused(Red and Yellow), and a Tri-color LED that can produce virtually any color you like (which is awesome).

A Trimpot – A variable resistor aka a potentiometer. The resistance value isn’t listed, but I’d guess 10K ohm. I actually can’t find it anywhere else on their site, so it’s hard to tell.

A Buzzer – One of those things you can hook up to voltage and it starts making annoying sounds. Used in computers when the manufacturer is too cheap to put in an actual speaker (I don’t think that happens anymore…)

Big ol’ button – Okay, that’s my name for it. They called it a 12mm button. This is nice if you need a big target. I like bigger buttons, and these seem to be a bit of a rarity.

5 330ohm resistors – The heart of electronics design, you’ve got to have some resistors.

Comparing the two:

In case you didn’t want to scroll up and down and thoughtfully consider both packages, I’ve decided to do it for you… I’m cool like that.

Jumper Wires: Adafruit gives you way more jumper wires in more colors. The only downside that I mention here, is that Adafruit’s wires are just a bit shorter than Sparkfun’s. I can’t imagine this is a deal-killer for anyone. If you’re worried about wirelength, you should really consider the vastly greater number of wires you get with Adafruit.

LEDs: This is kind of a toughy. You get more LEDs with Adafruit, but you get sort of an uber-LED with the SparkFun kit.

Cables: Adafruit gives you more options, but their USB cable is shorter. If you’re working with a laptop (or a desktop which is actually on your desk), this isn’t a problem, but I’ve always been surprised how short 3 feet turns out to be. You have more power options with the Adafruit pack.

ProtoShield: You get one with Adafruit. You don’t with Sparkfun. Looking at SparkFun’s site though, it looks like you can buy a protoshield kit from them which brings the cost up to about the same as Adafruit’s. I wonder if they ought to throw that in there for competitiveness.

Other components: SparkFun’s kit comes with a variety of sensors and… attention-grabbing-things (what is the opposite of a sensor?). Adafruit’s pack is prepared for you to put them together in a specific way.

Costs: Flat out, the SparkFun kit is $15 less (but see above note about the protoshield) than the Adafruit kit. The cost is a mix though. As I said above, you don’t clearly get as many starting points with the SF kit as with Adafruit. I think that you can acutally build a complete product with Adafruit’s kit, but with the Sparkfun kit you’re limited to cool projects. On the other hand, I think you have a much wider range of cool projects with Sparkfun.

Roundup of parts separately - “What if I want to buy it ala carte?” Well, I did the math so you didn’t have to:

• Adafruit: ~$75.00 – The components for the tutorial aren’t listed separately, so I guessed $5.00 for the resistors, LEDs, and Photocell.
• SparkFun: ~$56.00 – They don’t have the trimpot listed on their site, I assumed $1.15 (because that rounded it up nicely.)

Adafruit Industries is giving you more for your dollar, SparkFun is giving you a wider selection of components.

Go Buy One – Adafruit Industries SparkFun Electronics

Both kits have their strengths obviously. When I look at them, SparkFun’s kit seems to be designed more for the tinkerer, whereas Adafruit’s leans more towards the absolutely beginner – the person who is truely stepping into electronics and Microcontrollers for the first time. One thing that the Adafruit kit focuses on is it’s association with the tutorials available on the sister site,  Ladyada.net. These tutorials will get you into the basics of programming the Arduino, and I think give you the means to start exploring on your own. The SparkFun kit stands out to me as a kit for a person who is willing to venture out on their own a little bit more. Diving headfirst into forums and the Arduino playground, a person armed with this kit could really produce some awesome stuff. You have to be an exploring personality though -SparkFun doesn’t provide and specific starting points. Either way, you’re getting value, so figure out which you think you’d do well with, and let me know your opinions.

Lastly, these aren’t the only Arduino Starter kits out there. MakerShed has one, and so does Hacktronics, and I’m sure there are a handful more out there. Look around. If you have questions, or are looking for suggestions, leave a comment and I’ll see if I can help!

Update:

There’s more to see! I’ve reviewed 5 more kits including 3 from the UK. Check out part 2 of this review.

The Mini Comes Vostro A90 comes with an SSD, but you need to bump it up to 16gb to make it worth while really. Some will tell you to skip that, and buy a 32gb or 64gb from RunCore as it’s “The Fastest”, but results have been mixed. If you plan on making this your main Mac (and really you shouldn’t), deck it out as much as you can from the get-go.

(from top-left) 16GB SSD, 2GB RAM, WiFi Card, WWAN space, Uncle Bernie, Aunt Lois... wait,what?

With any luck, you already have a few of those, and so you’ll just need the netbook. If you’re looking for a cheap portable Mac, and you’re a bit technically inclined willing to follow instructions on a website, this is a very solid Mac. Just don’t expect support from Apple…

Before...

...After!

Installation

Getting OS X installed on a the Dell Mini 9 (which, I must sadly inform you was just canceled) is easy, with just a few snafus. One of the trade-offs for the size of a netbook is you lose the option of an optical drive. So you have to figure out how to install from a DVD with no DVD drive. No problem – How about a network install? No-go, To get OS X on a non-Apple computer, you have to trick the computer into thinking it’s an Apple computer and you have to do it while it’s booting. These days it’s done with a simple bootloader. If you have another Mac to work with, you’re in pretty good luck. What you do is image the OS X install DVD onto a USB stick, and add the bootloader on the stick. Really, you just need to make sure you follow the instructions. A lot of people are dual-booting these machines. I try to stay as pure-mac as I can, so that’s not so much of an issue for me. It can be done though.

Use

What can I say? It’s a Mac through-and-through. There are a few hiccups that you have to deal with. The one that has been most problematic (and this is not very problematic…) has been trackpad control. The trackpad functions excellently out of the box with OS X, excepting it is super sensitive, and there’s no touch-to-tap. This is handled by software and the drivers are available, but have no newbie-friendly installer and there is an installer. The only other thing that I can complain about is that some windows are designed to be a certain height, and that height does not fit comfortably on the Dell’s screen. The biggest culprit here is the System Preferences. It’s just a bit too tall. The built-in Mic works, but the microphone port does not. This has been an issue with hackintosh users for a while, and I’m not sure it’s ever going to be fixed.

login...

Too tall...

Web Browser

Plans

I have a lot of plans for the MacBook mini, and I’m not really sure how they’re all going to work out.

1) Mobility at home. On my desk at home I’ve got a 24″ iMac, and I think it’s great. The only time I run into trouble is when I’m working on a project. I like to be able to reference whatever I’m working on or if I’ve got instructions on the computer. My dremel (like most) is not an indoor tool. With the netbook, I can see information anywhere I need it, any time I need it. I hope to setup a keyboard and display out in the garage to plug in when I need reference.

2) Mobility on the Road – Car-puter. With iPhone tethering, I can access anything just about anywhere. While this was possible on the iPhone, many times there were features missing from use, and no flash whatsoever. To expand this idea, I hope eventually to place a small monitor in my dash opposite of the windshield to create a heads-up-display. The display in the mini isn’t bright enough for daylight use, but I’m sure I’ll be able to find something, and wire it in. This will probably be a reality more with my eventual Electric Car, rather than my current vehicle. With all that in place, I’d like to add voice commands to it. Additionally, I’d like to add a GPS module to it, either externally, or internally.

What about now?

Heck, I don’t know. Sometimes I work on a project to accomplish something only to find that the project was more interesting than the end product. So who knows what we’ll be doing with it. I’ve tried tethering it to watch YouTube during lunch (you can find any episode of transformers online), but it didn’t quite work out so well… Edge isn’t quite fast enough for streaming.

I’m pleased with the purchase. What I need to do is make the thing earn it’s place in the house!

The reality is that I do know, but the things that I want are so far outside of the normal range of affordability that I generally don’t want to bring it up. I don’t want to ask people for an electric car (if such a thing exists in the US – c’mon automakers, get with the program), or a $3000 projector, or a 42″ flat LCD TV, or whatever. Up until 9 months ago, one of the answers was “A new computer”, but having struck a deal with Hykel, my wife I bought a new iMac back in July, and it’s been great. So thankfully I don’t need a new computer. I’m very happy with it.

When it gets down to a few days before my birthday, I manage to come up with a few things that are affordable, but it’s too late. Everyone’s already bought me a bunch of stuff. I like it, but I also kick myself for missing out on something that I wanted, and actually could have gotten. So here, for my family, friends, or even strangers who want to buy random stuff for me (really? No, I doubt there are any out there) I present to you my 2009 birthday Wishlist. I’ve provided links to the items and the prices I’ve found. As this site tends to focus on technology, I think most of these items are going to be tech-ish, but there might be something else thrown in there. All items are intended to be at most $100, and hopefully quite a bit less.

On with the List:

WiFly 802.11 Module – SparkFun Electronics ~$70
The WiFly module is basically a WiFi card that doesn’t plug into a computer, but instead talks to a Microcontroller. It draws very little power, and contains most of the complex stuff already built into it. So I’ve been eying this, and it’s something I’m interested in hooking up to my Arduino.

Protoshield for Arduino – Adafruit Industries ~$19 (protoshield) + $4 (breadboard)
Arduino is a basic electronics Micro-Controller board. It’s designed with the non-engineer in mind. It makes all of the tough stuff easy. This Proto Shield was designed to make prototyping with the Arduino a little easier. It plugs in on top of the Arduino and moves all of the pins up to the prototyping board. Coupled with the Tiny BreadBoard, it’s an awesome method of working with the Arduino.

EM-406A GPS Module – Adafruit Industries ~$60
A lot like the WiFly module, this GPS module is essentially a GPS tracker without the interface. You can plug this into a Micro-Controller and get GPS data out of it. This is a great way for a little electronic device to know something about the world in which it lives.

2GB iMac Memory Modules – Memory 2 Go – 2x ~$55
You need more Memory. This is the mantra that, if you’ve been anything more than a casual computer user, you have probably been saying for as long as you can remember. I can only remember on very rare occasions thinking “Wow, I have a ton of memory, I don’t need more than this!” When I have thought that, the feeling doesn’t last long. My iMac currently has 2GB of RAM in it, and while it’s been solid under the 2GB, it’s a well testified fact that the machine will perform far better with more memory. The 2x up there points out that I’ll need 2 of these memory modules to make it practical. (The modules run around $26 a piece, give or take.)

Red on Black Serial Enabled 16×2 LCD – SparkFun Electronics ~ $25
When one builds little electronic devices, sooner or later one needs to know what’s going on with them. Usually little lights will suffice, but sometimes a little more information is helpful. What a great opportunity for a little screen that displays little characters. I could attach this to a robot, and the robot could say things like “You’re in my way” or “I’m a robot”. Or alternatively, it could produce some useful information.

Flex Sensor – SparkFun Electronics ~ $13
Remember the PowerGlove? Of course you remember the PowerGlove. Actually, you probably remember a punk kid from 1989′s The Wizard saying “I love the PowerGlove… It’s so bad!” Yeah, we all hated Lucas. Not just for being a jerk, but also for having the PowerGlove. Well, this sensor is the very type of sensor that was used in the PowerGlove’s fingers to determine how your hand was moving. In spite of it’s appearance, this sensor’s only 4.5 inches long. Here’s one example of one way to interface with a flex sensor. Get me a Flex Sensor, and you will have, in a small way, have gotten me the power glove I never had.

Make Magazine Subcription (Print + Digital) – MAKEzine.com ~ $34.95
I’m not big into publications. Books or Magazines, really. Most (non-fiction tech) books and magazines contain great information… for last week. Magazines in this day and age are painfully outdated in the space of news, and useful information. Books can be even moreso. Make Magazine I think has a fairly unique setup. What they publish comes from an effort of wanting to do something yourself. Solving a solution on your own, and sharing that knowledge with the world. Their information isn’t out of date, because they’re approaching a problem with what they have at the time. They don’t rely on the “most recent”, but on the “what’s available”, and the latter is less likely to change than the former. Make offers the Digital + Print subscription combo for the same price as the regular print. Can’t go wrong there.

Benjamins - Your PocketBook ~ n*$100
Generally, I think it’s not very classy to mention cash in a wishlist. It reminds me of Sally’s letter to santa on the Charlie Brown Christmas Special: “If it seems too complicated, make it easy on yourself: just send money. How about tens and twenties? ” Indeed, the whole concept of gift giving kind of relies on the idea of giving something to someone from the heart. One might ask “Why even make a wishlist? Isn’t a gift supposed to be something that an individual comes up with on their own?” Perhaps so. I want people to feel confident that they’re getting me something that is interesting to me. I think in the end, I don’t really want cash. Something I’d definitely be interested in is gift certificates from a few specific places. Namely, the following:

• SparkFun Electronics
• AdaFruit Industries
• Portland Tech Shop – (Also, a membership here would be a dream, but my goal was to keep every at or below $100.)

So there it is, everything I can think of that I’ve been recently wanting, but unable to get for myself for various reasoning. I hope anyone who wants to get me a gift will know that it’s not what you get, but the thought that counts. I know that’s horribly cliché, but I’ve learned quite recently that it’s also wonderfully true. I will be grateful that you took the time to think of me and my birthday.
Alright readers, What do you think? What have been the things that you’ve been looking after? Which of those things fall into the “affordable” price range? Chime in.