Arduino. Or: How to hack electronics w/o knowing a damn thing

I've paused on the colt stuff to learn some electronics + micro-controllers (the little chips that get stuck in your car, fridge, cell phone, etc) so that I can build my own computer controlled machines. The "Arduino" boards are a great way to go about it. You can download code onto them from your computer across the USB port and then use this code to control electronic things you wire together and plug into the board. (E.g., by reading whether pins have power or not, and setting power out on other pins.)

The "hello world" program is to hook up a LED light + a resister to the chip and make it blink by turning a pin off and on. I've only ever used computers to toss around 0s and 1s, so it's neat to make them control atoms (sort of). Hopefully by the end of the weekend I can use it to drive some stepper motors that I can then attach to a lathe to make it computer controlled.

Here's a set of great class notes aimed at artists from "todbot" (http://todbot.com/blog/spookyarduino/)

http://todbot.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/arduino_spooky_projects_class1.pdf

http://todbot.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/arduino_spooky_projects_class2.pdf

http://todbot.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/arduino_spooky_projects_class3.pdf

http://todbot.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/arduino_spooky_projects_class4.pdf

If microcontrollers and electronics has always been mysterious, I'd really recommend checking the notes out --- the audience is non-technical artists, so it requires minimal knowledge. On the other hand, it's not pablum. He shows how to build cool stuff quick.

If you are going to go this route, just buy the $89 kit at: http://oomlout.com/ards.html Everything included to go from nothing to cool things. A bunch of different projects, many variations. I've spent all friday night tweaking on it!

Useful links:

• A bunch of neat arduino links: http://www.tigoe.net/pcomp/code/
• Useful blog tutorial on how to use a voltmeter: http://www.ladyada.net/learn/multimeter/voltage.html
• And more generally an arduino tutorial at the same blog: http://www.ladyada.net/learn/arduino/index.html (Which turns out to be the person I bought my arduino chips from! She has a post on how to build a cell phone jammer: http://www.ladyada.net/make/wavebubble/)
• Soldering guide: http://www.epemag.wimborne.co.uk/solderfaq.htm
• The comments of this thread are very useful: http://todbot.com/blog/2006/12/06/arduino-serial-c-code-to-talk-to-arduino/
• Nice set of tutorials on arduino and many other related things: http://itp.nyu.edu/physcomp/Tutorials/Tutorials
• And, of course, the "official" arduino forums: http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl
• Heat sink discussion: http://www.thebox.myzen.co.uk/Tutorial/Power.html
• Awesome electronics lessons: http://mysite.du.edu/~etuttle/electron/elecindx.htm