Not much has happened today, I participated in a teleconference which fortuitously was a teleconference and not a physical meeting as a punch up may have occurred. Then we had lunch out while Sarah seethed a bit. Then we came back and worked a bit. Something else must have happened but I can’t remember anything in particular.
At some point this morning postie delivered my jiffy bag of Arduinos (They’re italian so the plural is probably Arduini) from Modern Device Company. An Arduino is a little PCB with an Atmel microcontroller and support circuitry (regulator, resonator, that kind of thing). The micro is programmed with a bootloader to simplify the development process and the really cool thing is that all the code, the PCB layout and all the programming tools are GPL or Creative Commons licenced which means you can have a whole development setup for almost no money!
The modules I have look like this, except they’re just a bunch of bits at the moment and the PCB is a natty white instead of green:
The Modern Device Company Arduino modules are only $15 as a kit and shipping to the UK is very reasonable so I’ve bought a couple for a play around with. These things have been used for all sorts of cool projects like interfacing with a Nintendo Wii controller, robotics and, my favourite, blinkenlights. I like LEDs. Hopefully I’ll get some time to actually build these boards up soon and flash some LEDs. Just as soon as I finish panic PHPing…
