Thanks!

!

Cszostek (#6)

I wouldn’t consider myself a hardware guy or a serious software coder, and I found the Arduino and it’s C based language very easy to deal with. The documentation it comes with has lots of tutorials and sample code fragments to help you out. If you have done casual coding in any language you should pick it up in no time.

My first project with it was a shutter timer for my DSLR that uses three touch buttons (AKA thumbtacks) and two 7 segment LED displays to control the number and interval between shots.

I have now graduated to a 7×20 LCD (7×2.5 foot) matrix that will hang off my balcony and crawl Christmas/Hanukkah/Quanza etc greetings in as many languages as I can find.

After that has run it’s course I am thinking of using the audio I/O to do some flanging/delay/catch and repeat effects for my brother’s electric guitar/PA.

Depends on what you want to do with it. If you want to make something really fancy you need to know more about electronics, if you want to make an LED blink you just connect it to your computers serial port, click your mouse three or four times and it blinks, a clever badger could do it.

If you are interested in such things it’s probably worth the $20 or $30 it costs you to get a basic kit. Once you start playing with it you’ll start to get more ideas about what you can use it for.

If you don’t like problem-solving though it probably isn’t for you. Any non-trivial program you write is likely to have bugs, and you’ll need to be able to figure them out if you want it to do anything original.

I’m currently working on getting the Arduino core running on the AVR Butterfly, a $20 demonstrator board that comes with a speaker, temp sensor, voltage sensor and an LCD. It won’t plug into shields, but it includes a handful of interesting components a beginner might like.

Right now we’ve got it running example apps that read the temperature sensor and send the current temperature out the serial port. Fun stuff.

My next project is a laser gun synthesizer.

@SIDB here is the link to the no-drm pdf directly from o’reilly http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596155513/

It’s funny; I still prefer reading fiction on paper. But with something like this, where I just want to extract the information from it right now, I’m unwilling to wait on UPS and go though all the analog hurdles to distribution when they’re so unnecessary.

on thing to consider with a book on electronics, a lot of folks sit at workbench or table and flatten a book out to read it, some do get PDFs and print out some pages and others use a laptop too – for whatever reason most seem to prefer a book.

but let me know the price you think is fair for a PDF and i’ll see what’s possible (i work at MAKE).

And yes, PDF. I like dead tree books, myself, because they’re easier to take with you to the bathroom =)

Was that supposed to be a link to somewhere? I’m keen to find a PDF copy too – MAKE seems to want as much for shipping as they do for the tiny little book.