I’ve got some comments that the Boarduino kit is too wide and thus crowds out space on a breadboard…
Here’s an example of how to use 2 halfsized breadboards to make a nice workspace.
First, get 2 halfsized breadboards (this will work with fullsized ones too, of course, but itll be huge!)
Slice the backing of one of the power rails and pull it off
Snap together the two pieces
Plug in your boarduino, now you have tons of workspace!
You can peel off the backing and stick the breadboards (and extra rail) onto a piece of cardboard (or anything really) to give it more support.
One of the reasons I designed my own Arduino clone is so that people who wanted to design wearable or portable (ie small/lightweight) projects would have a nice and slender alternative. jordi’s original helicopter used an Arduino Diecimilla, but for weight reasons he decided to go with a Boarduino for rev 2, but even that didn’t get away without a lot of hacking….
Magician13134 got an Arduino starter pack and has been going all out with hacking! He designed this Arduino 3-axis tilt-mouse using an accelerometer breakout from Parallax (now available from Radio Shack) and some windows programming skills. Then he etched his own PCB, doing the layout in MSPAINT! How hardcore is THAT?
Check out the project as it unfolds, at the ladyada.net forums
When I was in grade school I made a menorah in Hebrew school. Unfortunately it was just made of plastic and wood and when we left it lit overnight it caught on fire and scorched our windowpane.
This is a classic circuit, but until now I hadn’t gotten around to building one. Its useful whenever you need a floating supply or if you need a quick way to poke a signal voltage into a circuit. (I suggest it for people building and testing x0xb0x’s)
I’ve been playing around with alternative layouts to the popular Arduino project. Here is one I got in my recent batch of PCBs. It comes as a kit, to be assembled by the customer.
It has basically the same parts as the original: an ATmega168 and 16MHz crystal, 9V DC jack, 5V power supply, power LED, a red LED connected to pin 13, a programming header and a reset button.
But, it doesn’t have a USB jack, as the chip is really tough to solder. Instead you can use a USB-ttl cable (available from Mouser) or a USBmini type thing:
The nice thing about it is that you can plug it into a $3 solderless breadboard and it will be about $20 for a kit. The sad part is you can’t use shields and a separate USB connection.
It will be interesting to see whether the new layout will be useful to people!
Since it seemed to be the hip thing to do, I ordered a set of prototype PCBs from Gold Phoenix. The quality is very nice (although I did pay for electrical test) and the turn around was speedy.
One of the projects I got back was Mystery Kit! Can you guess what Mystery Kit is? Shouldn’t be too hard…
