arduinoprojects.com

At http://www.desk-nijverdal.nl >> Arduino >> Hello World, an easy to build POV system is presented.
Hardware description and software can be downloaded as a pdf file.
2010 Reproduction of this file or parts thereof in any way, without permission of the author, is encouraged.

The hardware is published on
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-vBtmPRfng
while a full description (4MB pdf) will be available on
http://www.desk-nijverdal.nl

I just started this week with the Arduino, and it seems to be going well.

I've done the basics (hooking up various LEDs, getting RGB LEDs to work properly, driving a small motor, built the Adafruit Proto-Shield) and think I'm ready to start on some more advanced projects.

I ordered two LCD's (one 2x16 and one 4x20) so those should come soon. Additionally, I supplemented my Arduino with a Seeeduino from Makershed.

My project for the LCD's is going to be to the following:

This is a page I found extremely useful for calculating my resistors in LED circuits. You choose the number of LED's and the availiable source voltage and the program helps design the circuit for you. The nice thing about this page is that it also draws a sketch of the circuit* to build as a byproduct of the calculation:

(* be sure to click "wiring diagram")

http://led.linear1.org/led.wiz

To use the Wizard it might help to have the following data in lieu of the actual specifications of your LED's:

here's a table to help you make decent guesses:

Hi everyone! One one of the useful things, especially if you have many boards that you regularly experiment with is to have some cheat sheets, ideally attached or close to your regular board. The reason is that in many cases one forgets the driving voltages an so on and might make toast out of an expensive board. I have these two texts on stickers behind the plastic boards I have made to hold my Arduinos:

Arduino Diecimilla
The power source is selected by the jumper between the USB and power plugs. To power the board from the USB port (good

In the last few days I've learnt a lot of new things. One of the most important - how to handle high-current electric circuits. The power that comes out of Arduino pins is enough to power some leds or write some text on a LCD display, but it's not enough to power a DC motor or other devices. Arduino pins output up to 40mA of voltage, while the DC motors I have require around 350mA. While finding out the ways of passing more current to my DC motors I found a great site explaining these basic things in a very understandable manner:

One of the things I was lacking all the time in my Arduino mini-projects was resistors - most of the projects we see on the internet require you to use some of them. As an absolute beginner in electronics I chose to buy a 480 resistor set which contains resistors with 16 different values, each of them in 30 pieces:

Besides that I also ordered a couple of photodiodes to use for my upcoming line-follower robot. Line follower robot was one of my first aims when I purchased the Arduino. So I'm quite close to getting started with it.

At first I thought that connecting and controlling a LCD display with Arduino is something complex and can be done only by people with good electronics background. I was wrong. It took me half an hour to figure out the steps to do to connect a newly bought LCD display. The only thing to note - the LCD display should be Hitachi HD44780 compatible. I bought my two LCD displays on eBay: LCD Display HD44780. Why did I buy two of them?

This morning a door bell woke up both of my kids after just a few minutes of sleep. I was quite angry at first, but my mood improved as I saw a postman holding a thick letter in his hands with my name on it. The LCD displays I ordered last thursday are already delivered. I must say I'm impressed by the shipping time.

I guess I'm going to restart the Arduino projects I had in my mind - a couple of steps have been done already.

The first and the most important - I have rebuilt this website to allow everybody participate in the content creation of this site.
The second - I have ordered new parts for my Arduino projects - two LCD displays. So you can expect to see my experience with some LCD test projects on this website soon.