(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.
So you just finished your first PCB in Eagle. Good job. Me too actually, and after a few days I came across something very cool. Eagle3D. Eagle3D takes your Eagle .brd file and renders it as a 3D image, so you get to see the board in a photorealstic way. (I think I’ve been saving up photorealistic to use in a post-1995 context. I really don’t think I’ve seen it used to describe anything since the box of Myst). So you download Eagle3D, you download POVray, you copy your include files over there, generate your .pov file, and you launch POVray in anticipation… and then it crashes.
There’s been a lot of wondering I think, about whether or not the Nissan LEAF EV was going to offered in anything other than that blueish color they’ve been parading around. Well, today the LEAF reservation email came today and one of the steps they offered was to choose your reservation color. Since the question has been sitting on a lot of peoples’ minds (including my own) I answer with a triumphant “Yes!”.
So last night I was looking for a song that I’ve heard a million times, but have never known the name of. It’s an instrumental, and I’m pretty confident that you’ve heard it too. I would describe it as a sort of peppy, upbeat, 50′s ad spot background theme. Lots of sticatto plucking of strings. After several unsuccessful attempts, my wife offered a trade. She would look for my song if I would go find the paintbrushes she was looking. Surprisingly, it worked! She found an album containing the song and I found the paintbrushes.
The song was written by a man named Laurie Johnson. He is a British composer and the song is called “Happy Go Lively”. It’s owned an licensed by a company called Associated Production Music. Production Music, is a term given to music that’s essentially made for the sole purpose of licensing it out for productions (movies, television, etc)
Considering how well-known and familar, but unidentifyable this song is, I thought I’d post it to a page and stick as much google-glue as I could on it. If you found this page through a search engine after having some difficulty, give me your search terms and I’ll put them in the keywords, so people like us don’t need to struggle to find this delightful little song.
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.
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…
(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 just finished your first PCB in Eagle. Good job. Me too actually, and after a few days I came across something very cool. Eagle3D. Eagle3D takes your Eagle .brd file and renders it as a 3D image, so you get to see the board in a photorealstic way. (I think I’ve been saving up photorealistic to use in a post-1995 context. I really don’t think I’ve seen it used to describe anything since the box of Myst). So you download Eagle3D, you download POVray, you copy your include files over there, generate your .pov file, and you launch POVray in anticipation… and then it crashes. 
