Re: Electronics Projects and PC Interfacing

[mattkotys@gmail.com]

  Ooh - that Processing development environment IS cool.  Yeah, I've put a serial PIC programmer together from schematics before, so that doesn't seem too bad at all.  And I'll shed my luddite ways and get the USB parts, anyway she bought new shoes last weekend, iirc. 

Thanks for the advice.  I'm sure to have more questions.


------Original Message------
From: Tim McDonough
To: LUCI
Cc: Matthew Kotys
Subject: Re: Electronics Projects and PC Interfacing
Sent: Dec 20, 2009 3:25 PM

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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