Arduino anyone?

[#1]

  Legs. I need my components with legs!
DomS - That's quite a Man Lab you've got there.
So what does happen to all of those lost SMDs? Answer, the spiders have them.

[#2]

That's a fraction of the man-lab - when we moved house I told the wife I'd need some space to run my business so wherever we moved to needed plenty of man-lab area It is still a work in progress.
There are some Mega etch tanks out of picture and you may just be able to glimpse a half built CNC machine on the right. I'm also working on a direct to PCB laser etch system but as with everything it all takes time and money.
Some more pics

[#3]

Quote from: Hairy

I have an Arduino UNO starter kit on order, being delivered tomorrow by the email. I was going to get another pi for playing with but this was cheaper and came with loads of bits  So anyone use one of these baby’s?

I had an arduino mega - the 2560. It was cool, I got a servo moving around, multitasking and a few other things but it kept playing up and refusing to take new code via usb / freeze. I sent it back to maplin in the end and got a refund. I did intent to replace it with another but with medical and financial circumstances taking their toll I never did.
Cool little gizmo though, certainly great for small basic things where a pi would be overkill.

[#4]

Having fun today with one of these
Not using the remote, but one of my old PVR ones.
setting up the case statement to parse all the keys was fun  (Wrote the key def & hex code to text file, then did a bash script to write the case statement)
But now I know it works I will move it to my xbmc and see if I can use it there and get rid of the old xbox remote & receiver.
Also got one of these, but having issues getting my head round how to get anything useful on it. This serial writing is strange 
I had it displaying 12345678 & 87654321 but though I could combine the IR & it to display the IR Hex code.. still working on that.

[#5]

You arduino / pi experts
should post some tutorials ?

[#6]

plenty of them out there already!
magpi.com is full of them for the pi

[#7]

TORPC - Anyone can start swimming through this > http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/HomePage
Hairy McBiker - I eBayed a Lot of MAX7219's to drive some minature IC sized seven-seg displays that I've had since the digital bronze age. And now they drove I've left them on the breadboard awaiting longer nights and a funky new C++ segment driver class - like there's not already a zillion 7seg libraries under the Visual heading on http://playground.arduino.cc/Main/InterfacingWithHardware#Output
Anyway, I found myself forking away from generic Arduino and gravitating back towards AVR programming.
This became my goto/gosub page > http://www.nongnu.org/avr-libc/user-manual/index.html
The usage for your 8 way displays is on industrial counters and pinball machines?

My question is, what constitutes an "Arduino" anyway? My understanding is Arduino is a shield form factor with a bootloader and, is made in Italy. Everything else is an "Arduino Compatible" Chinese rip off.
I've flashed Optiboot into naked 328s using AVR Dude... so are they Arduinos or not?
FYI - OptiBoot > http://code.google.com/p/optiboot/

[#8]

Quote from: Thunderclap

My question is, what constitutes an "Arduino" anyway? My understanding is Arduino is a shield form factor with a bootloader and, is made in Italy. Everything else is an "Arduino Compatible" Chinese rip off. I've flashed Optiboot into naked 328s using AVR Dude... so are they Arduinos or not?

Essentially the Arduino Project is an open source hardware and software platform.  Part f that has resulted in the standard prototype board and the companion shields.  Being open source,  anybody can create compatible boards, or completely different boards.
To be Ardunio compatible usually means the chip can be programmed from the Arduino IDE  (which covers optiboot).  In hardware terms, it usually means it conforms to the Ardunio Shield specs.
I've been playing recently with the bare minimum required to be Arduino compatible,  an Atmega328, 16MHz crystal and a few capacitors,  connected to the PC via an FTDI cable.  I also used my  Arduoino Duemilanove  with the ArduinoISP firmware to install the bootloaders into them.
My only gripe with the Arduino Project, is that they chose to implement their own IDE rather than building on an existing one like Eclipse  (which someone else has done, sort of).

[#9]

Quote from: Thunderclap

http://playground.arduino.cc/Main/InterfacingWithHardware#Output The usage for your 8 way displays is on industrial counters and pinball machines?

I will have a look, was googling for arduino 8 7seg and got various results.
Probably I just got them as I like playing with led's.

[#10]

Hairy McBiker - I luv LEDs.

Quote from: kmilburn

My only gripe with the Arduino Project, is that they chose to implement their own IDE rather than building on an existing one like Eclipse  (which someone else has done, sort of).

The Arduino IDE is just a nice Java wrapper around the raw AVR tools. Well think of the target market. Newbies. But you can program Atmel chips using Eclipse but, it's not easy setting it all up... Seriously not easy. Eclipse links and makes the HEX file, but flashing the HEX file to the chip really requires AVRDUDE. And that's provided your signatures and fuse values are correct ( the Arduino boards.txt file takes care of all of that ) Check these out >
http://playground.arduino.cc/code/eclipse
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-get-started-with-Eclipse-and-AVR/step2/Preparation/
and Eclipse AVR
http://avr-eclipse.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/The_AVR_Eclipse_Plugin

However, the latest versions of the compiler toolchain AVR-GCC are not 100.000% compatible  with Eclipse-AVR : there's some unexpected compiler errors that shouldn't happen, but they do. The version of the AVR-GCC toolchain ( and Cygwin ) that ships with the Arduino IDE is okay, but that's because it's ancient.
Alternatively, there's the hardcore Atmel Studio 6 - which is a pimped version of Microsoft's dotNet based Visual Studio >
http://www.atmel.com/tools/ATMELSTUDIO.aspx
Anyone, if you want to go commando and flash the HEX files/Bootloader directly onto the chips using FTDI, check out AVRDUDE which is a really cool command line utility. It's what the Arduino IDE uses in the background - watch the messages panel when uploading.
http://www.nongnu.org/avrdude/
btw, the Arduino bootloader zoo is located in {root}/Arduino/Hardware/Arduino/Bootloaders/ - It's a big zoo.
+++
I should add that AVRDude is already lurking on your Arduino installation. It's in {root}/Arduino/Hardware/tools/avr/bin
The attached image is an example of AVRDude in action inside the 'Dos Prompt'. [ Linux people start laughing now ]
Here, AVRDude is reading the Flash memory on board an ATMega328P and dumping it to a hex file. This is a neat way of preserving an embedded program ( provided the SPIEN fuse is set ). Here, the programmer is on LPT1 - the printer port.
For anyone interested in fuse values, check out this Atmel fuse value calculator > http://www.engbedded.com/fusecalc