Stefan aka Noneus

I just got my Arduino I ordered at watterott (http://www.watterott.com/). Watterott is a german shop, which sells arduino and accessories for it. I orderd the standard Arduino board: a Duemilanove.

I also ordered a book for it. It’s called “Getting started with Arduino”. But this book is for people that never had anything to do with programming, electronics and programming. So it’s pretty much useless to me. I gave it to me father. Perhaps it will get him interested in electronics and microcontrollers.

But the board itself is pretty cool. You don’t have to know that much about the microcontoller for settings of special-function-registers and so like with the mikrocontrollers I tried at home or university. You just have to download the Arduino software. Then put in a sketch, which is basicly writing C++ with some addons for the mikrocontroller. Now connect the Arduino with an USB-cable and upload the sketch. As a first test I connected 9 leds to the arduino board. Each in series with a 1kOhm transistor. I wrote a short sketch, which now outputs predefined patterns to the 9 leds. For the full sketch take a look under the more link.

Here are some pictures and an animated GIF showing a pattern I display with my sketch.

Getting Started with Arduino by MAKE

Arduino with some LEDs

The patterns I programmed:

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I recently bought a cheap Logitech mouse for my EEE Pc. But the mouse came with a very long cable i didn’t really need. So I tried my luck shortening the cable. It’s pretty easy. Just open the mouse. unplug the usb-cable from the pcb and cut the cable. Strip the wires. Stripping the wires without a wire striping tool can be really hard, because the cables are really thin. Next I simply twisted the wires and put a bit of solder on there. Put on some electrical tape, so there is no chance the wires can touch. Put it all back together and tada!

My exams are over. And one thing I wanted to do in my semester break is learning about AVR’s. So I decided to order an Evulation Board, a 1m serial cable and finally an Atmel ATMEGA32 microcontroller. To my suprise the evaluation board came in pieces and I first had to solder everything on there. So I did (no pictures of that). My next problem was powering the board and the microcontroller. Since the board had a voltage controller on it I could connect a 9V battery I had lying around. Just striped some wires and connected them (Look at the first picture.). So I tried connecting it to my workstation. That’s a problem, because my workstation has no serial port. My thinkpad dockingstation has a serial port and so I hooked it up there. First I downloaded WinAVR and downloaded a little program that lights LED1 and LED2 in a 1 second cycle. (It didn’t do one second. I probably need to tell the board to use the right quartz.) And guess what! It worked! More AVR related news soon