Re: Electronics Projects and PC Interfacing

[Tim McDonough <tmcdonough@gmail.com>]

mattkotys@gmail.com wrote:

> Tim, I will order an Arduino kit when my wife isn't looking.  I
> already have a PICkit2 and several breadboards, misc ICs, ... so I
> can play with those throughout the holidays, but Make magazine and
> others have certainly sold me on that platform.  The Morse decoder
> seems like a formidable challenge - maybe just the right project for
> a GPL debut.  I've never published any software before, and eager to
> get my feet wet.  I'll let LUCI know about my progress.

A nice benefit of the Arduino gear in addition to all the examples 
available is that it's development environment is hosted on all three 
major platforms as is a similar environment called "Processing" which 
makes it quite easy to write GUI apps for Linux, Windows, or Mac. They 
have quite a few examples of things that talk with Arduino boards.

If you already have a solderless breadboard you can easily clone an 
Arduino right on the board. You can get an Atmel ATMega328 and a 16 MHz 
crystal from the sources I mentioned that already has the Arduino 
bootloader burned into it. You can use a serial interface instead of USB 
and get started for about $10-$12 instead of $30. The ATMega part has a 
UART built in and I can point you to ways to fake the RS232 voltage 
levels that work very well for pennies.

Tim
Springfield, IL


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