Microcontroller Adventures

Arduino Fever

It used to be that the Basic Stamp was your best bet if you wanted get started in microcontroller projects without a lot of prior electronics experience and soldering skill. While Basic Stamps are still great tools, a less expensive, open source alternative has been gaining in popularity: The Arduino. The Arduino is an awesome little microcontroller development system for around 30 bucks that comes with a software package that is free to download. Adafruit Industries makes a great version of the Arduino that you can plug right in to a solderless breadboard. They call it the BoArduino and this thing rocks! It's just so handy to be able to plug it into a solderless breadboard and be ready to go. Don't forget to order a USB TTL-232 cable with it.

Limor Fried, the force behind Adafruit Industries, has created a really great online tutorial for learning the Arduino with lots of photos and helpful hints for beginners, including suggested tools (Adafruit also has lots of other great kits that are easy to solder for beginners). These resources make it much easier to get into the Maker movement and create your own do-it-yourself intelligent objects. There are tons of Arduino projects on the web and more seem to appear every day.

posted by Steve Murphy @ 3:11 PM