Do you Arduino?

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Erronius

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I've been tempted to get an Arduino (or one of the alternatives) and find a few projects to play around with. Has anyone here done anything like this? I've looked through Instructables and I saw a few interesting projects and I figured that the odds were good that someone here has.

Or has anyone simply built their own boards? One instructor was telling me that I could, and we have the bits/materials I believe, but I'm assuming that I'd need to get through the bulk of the digital/micro courses first.

I was thinking of trying to put together an Arduino + hard drives setup to play music, and I started wondering if I could use some PLCs to actuate the hard drives and increase the number of hard drives I'd be capable of using. But then I don't think I could get my hands on 50+ hard drives, or that inserting PLCs to gain outputs would even be workable.


 

Joeboo

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Please tell me there's something more useful to do with it than make retarded music...
 

BrutulTM

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I've been thinking about getting one but I haven't actually done it yet. They look like fun. I've done a few things for work and or school with PICs which were kind of a predecessor to Arduino.

I don't know anything about controlling hard drives. It might be easier to control it with something like a raspberry pi than trying to come up with your own circuitry.

As far as building boards goes, I know that there are home kits that you can use to make them, but I can't imagine that it would be easier or significantly cheaper than going with one of the online board fab companies. Some of them even have board layout software on their websites. I think trying to design and lay out a board would be pretty challenging for someone with no electronics education though unless you can get schematics and such from somebody.
 

Erronius

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Please tell me there's something more useful to do with it than make retarded music...
Yah, there is but useful isn't always what people take notice of. And also this was part of my problem with the stuff on Instructables...most of the stuff seemed either artsy-fartsy or just plain odd. Twitter-enabled coffee pot? WTH? I'd love to make something actually useful, but I'm not sure what that would be.

Arduino Projects

As far as building boards goes, I know that there are home kits that you can use to make them, but I can't imagine that it would be easier or significantly cheaper than going with one of the online board fab companies. Some of them even have board layout software on their websites. I think trying to design and lay out a board would be pretty challenging for someone with no electronics education though unless you can get schematics and such from somebody.
I've been encouraged to take on some 100 and 200 level etec courses and am in a 100 level AC circuit class now, but I'm already looking at having 2 associates and a cert before I leave and I'm not sure I want to take on a 3rd associates degree. Mostly because there aren't all that many common courses and I'm wondering how much of that I'd get transferring to a 4 year for EE or engineering tech anyways (still not sure on how the latter compares).

But I get your point, it's just that I had instructors telling me that I could make my own. The problem is that I don't have the knowledge to properly assess that yet, LOL.
 

khalid

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I was going to make fun of this shit but that project page actually has some damn cool stuff.
 

BrutulTM

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One of my stock tanks has a timer that totally sucks dick. I want to build one that does it better for less money (they cost like $100). I think an Arduino might be up to the task.
 

BrutulTM

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But I get your point, it's just that I had instructors telling me that I could make my own. The problem is that I don't have the knowledge to properly assess that yet, LOL.
You could definitely build a board. The question is whether you could design anything worth doing without learning a bit more about electronics. If all you want is to make a circuit board you could find a schematic for a simple circuit of some sort easily. If you want to do something more complicated, you might need some help.
 

Noodleface

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Done very little work with arduino but a lot with raspberry pi. For simplicity they both have positives and negatives. The rpi uses SD storage and runs Linux. From Linux you can access all of the gpios and treat the thing like a mini computer. At 16GB average SD card you could definitely do a lot with it. The problem is when you start connecting a lot of components you have to worry about drawing more current than the board supplies. Additionally, it has a fairly limited array of GPIOs.

The arduino supports a very nifty API and programming language that is very easy and intuitive. It has a similar amount of GPIOs but you can create soft serial ports which the RPI cannot. Not sure about storage on those but I assume you can add some. One major plus is arduino is supported probably 100x better than RPi. Radio shack carries arduino products. Another great thing about arduino is they sell little modules that expand your board (Ethernet, controllers, etc) and they are constantly developing new ones.

Don't make your own board until you play around with one of these, I think it would require a vast amount of work.

If you have any questions i can answer what I know.
 

Tuco

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We use arduinos in a few of our robotic projects. It's a neat little toy and you can do semi-embedded programming very easily on it. I agree with what noodleface says about it.
 

BrutulTM

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I was wondering if they had some kind of easy programming language for it. Hard to imagine all these hobbyists writing assembly.
 

Noodleface

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Definitely not assembly, unless you were writing to a bare metal unit. I know you can do bare metal RPi but not sure on arduino. If I ever have to write assembly again ill kill someone.
 

BrutulTM

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Yeah, but embedded microcontrollers traditionally use assembly. All my PIC projects were written in assembly.
 

Neph_sl

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I've thought about messing around with Arduino but never had a project in mind to actually make the purchase. It's not even a particularly expensive purchase (you can get an uno for $13 fromAmazon). I just don't know what I would do with the thing.

And you don't program in assembly, it's got it's ownlanguagewith a bunch of already writtenlibrariesfor things like reading/writing SD cards or connecting to the internet. You have to buy separate shields for extra functionality like wifi, SD cards, or even GSM networking though. There's also a crapton of compatible sensors that you can buy ranging from proximity switches, temperature/humidity, sound, distance, etc.

So you can do a lot with Arduino, the hard part is just coming up with a project. The most interesting thing I've seen with Arduino is an automated aquaponic garden.

 

brekk

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I've got one. It's a cool device, I've done way more on it then my RPi. The programming language is very intuitive.

After not touching it for a while I'm actually messing with a project right now. Learning how to control seven segement LEDs with shift registers and serial data. I'm planning to buy a cheap motorcycle helmet (not my good one) and I'm gonna try to setup a HUD inside it. I want to toggle between time, rpm, speed.

Phase 1 is getting the LEDs to output properly at an acceptable refresh rate.
Phase 2 is getting the HUD up and running inside a helmet.
Phase 3 is getting the Arduino to pull usable data from my bike. Which is from the 80's and should be interesting to say the least.
 

BrutulTM

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Why not use one of the little LCD shields instead of the 7 segment displays? You could probably display speed, time, and RPM all at the same time on a small LCD and that is one of the most basic shields for arduino.

You are correct that getting data from your bike is going to be challenging. For speed and time I think I would get aGPS shieldinstead of trying to use the bike's speedometer although I am sure you would need the antenna to be outside the helmet which might be a problem. Does the bike have any kind of electronics or a diagnostics interface like a car? If not I'm not sure how you could get RPM out of it.

I have thought about getting one to control a remote well I have for cattle. I have a timer gizmo now that you can set to turn on the well and run for a couple hours 3 or 4 times a day but it is a complete piece of shit despite costing like $150. I would like to build a better one and also maybe integrate a float switch for warmer parts of the year. It should be fairly simple with just a couple mechanical relays to turn the power on and off, a power supply for the electronics, some sort of time chip with a battery backup, and a basic UI for setting the time and the switching events. I am a bit concerned about whether the electronics can handle low temperatures because it does get to -30F here occasionally.

Maybe now that it's getting dark earlier I will have time to work on something like that.
 

brekk

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Shields are too big alongside an arduino inside a helmet. I can't wire it remotely because it's far to parallel. A real lcd would also block vision, I'm looking to have the 7 segment above my head projecting on the face shield. It is far brighter would work from a reflection

With shift registers I should be able to have a simple run of maybe 5 wires running from the arduino on the bike up to the helmet to drive the display.
 

BrutulTM

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Shields are too big alongside an arduino inside a helmet. I can't wire it remotely because it's far to parallel. A real lcd would also block vision, I'm looking to have the 7 segment above my head projecting on the face shield. It is far brighter would work from a reflection

With shift registers I should be able to have a simple run of maybe 5 wires running from the arduino on the bike up to the helmet to drive the display.
Can't you just connect the LCD to the shift register instead of the 7 segment displays? Not sure how the reflection thing would work with a backlit LCD though. I would also argue that 15 wires aren't really much harder to run than 5 if you're using a ribbon cable or something. Seven segment displays are just so 1983 and they are going to have to be mounted on something.
 

Noodleface

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7-segment LCDs are such a pain in the ass LOL. I wrote a driver for one in assembly and it required displaying one number on each 7 segment and then rotating to the next screen at something like 66Hz. I can't even remember. We had 4 7-segments wired to display the time.