I’ve always been very taken with Halloween setups. The orchestration, the excitement, and creativity all lead to a fun expression of the holiday. Halloween has taken it’s place among this generation as the time to do really really cool stuff. Every Halloween for the last 5 or 10 years, I’ve wanted to do something creative. A costume, a theme, anything interesting. Money and time always seemed to get in my way. This year I said “to heck with it” and at 3:30 on Sunday afternoon, I decided to make an animatronic display.
Arduino
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Last Minute Halloween
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.
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.
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.
Fun with IR
I’ve got a project coming up that deals with IR data transmission, so I thought I’d take some time and make a simple IR circuit to prove that I could. This is a very very simple IR Circuit. Basically, it goes as follows. (I’ll get a schematic up here eventually. I haven’t had success actuallly being able to make one… Linux: Still not ready for the Desktop IMO)
SparkFun Free Day Fallout.
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Posted on January 8, 2010 at 1:25 pm 2 Comments
This post is filed under Commentary and tagged Arduino, Electronics, Free, SparkFun.