So I have made some progress with the Arduino thanks to MAKE Magazine. Really a friend introduced me to MAKE which reawakened the inner DIY and tech-hacker beast that lay dormant within me. MAKE, in turn, introduced me to the Arduino as well as Sparkfun, who oddly enough end up being located in Boulder.
So my first project in electronics was actually creating a digital synthesizer, which you can see here.
It was intimidating, but I actually did quite well, and fortunately have a decent background with computers and programming, so that definitely helped.
Honestly though the Arduino platform is a lot more fun (if not easier) to work with, and people have already done a ton of cool stuff with it.
So far I’ve been able to write a cool library (firmware for the Arduino and software for the PC) that allows you to use the Arduino’s analog inputs as generic control surfaces for the PC. In otherwords you can wire up various analog sensors to the Arduino and the Arduino will talk to the PC and report the various voltage readings.
I’ve also made a small demo progam on the PC that let’s the PC talk to the Arduino and make it control a stepper motor (just a random one I picked up). The stepper motor is hooked up to the Arduino over a very basic circuit that is pretty much just a Darlington Array IC. You can send the RPM the motor should move at, the direction it should go, and the number of steps (each step is I think about 1.8 degrees so it’s very accurate). All in all very cool stuff, but not overly useful except at convincing people of my geeky nature.
So I’m trying to get inspiration as to where to go next with Arduino projects. Something that is achievable at my level of knowledge, but also a bit more tangibly useful than the previous experiments. If anyone has any ideas…
