Arduino

I've recently picked up an Arduino electronics prototyping platform starter kit!

Basically speaking, this is the first step in home open source robotics. The plans for building your own board are freely available online or you can buy a completed board. The IDE (integrated development environment) can be downloaded from the Arduino site and installed on your computer. I bought a complete starter kit including the Arduino Uno board shown above, the book "Getting Started With Arduino", a solderless breadboard, a usb cable, a 9V adapter, a DC motor, and enough LEDs, diodes, resistors, switches and wire to do all the projects in the book. The book itself is a quick read, only 111 pages and easily understood. If you google Arduino, you can find many projects and tutorials which people have created to interact with their environment. Just reading the book gave me some ideas for building some robotic playmates for the cats...

 

Sounds interesting, best of luck with your projects. I wouldn't mind a follow up from you when you have had time to play with this.
Yours
Zweiblumen

 

by coincidence, i just saw this project:

http://vimeo.com/27771789

which reads the close-captioning of television broadcasts for words like---o i dunno---kardashian or palin (so the blurb suggests, and who am i to say otherwise)---then mutes your television. its like audio disappearing. i like the idea.

 

I saw that auto-mute thing a few days ago too. It's that sort of thing that has really taken off with the Arudino. I was thinking of modifying the tv remote with accelerometer sensors so I could change channels and volume by just waving the remote in a certain direction.

I'd be happy to post photos of my projects, but I'm not allowed to yet.
--- merged: Aug 22, 2011 5:53 PM ---

 

I'd edit the above, but apparently we can't edit our own posts?

This is the 2nd project, using a pushbutton to light up an LED. The next projects involve programing the board to recognize when a button has been pressed, so you can turn an LED on or off.

 

Exciting. I had a class where we had to create some sort of "intelligent" mechanical apparatus using a microcontroller. Ever since, I've wanted to get one of these things and mess around with it. It's one of those things that I'd do if I had more time.

 

This looks cool. I think I'm gonna look into this a little more.

 

Arduino is great. If you're at all tinkery, there's no excuse not to have a few laying around....super useful way of bridging the gap between computers and the physical world. I have one that I've set up with four buttons for inputs and 4 relays to control 4 AC outlets for outputs that I've used for all kinds of things.

 

If you'd told me a decade ago that eventually I would be holding a star trek padd in my hand to look up how to use my personal microcontroller board to simply create whatever I wanted I'd've probably called you crazy.

I think that's what makes Arduino's so awesome, they're just usable enough to the average technologically inclined person that with a bit of effort you can literally look at the jetsons or something and say "Hey, I can actually take that Idea I had when I was five and make that now!"