Come on down to the Haiti relief event at Lowe Mill tomorrow. You will seldom see such an amazing musical lineup for $5 admission. There’s also a silent auction fundraiser, and Antitronics is contributing some items so come bid on them! Here’s what we’re putting into the hat:

Two Drawdio kits from Adafruit Industries. These are fun little kits that make a lencil that generates tones when you draw, using the resistance of the graphite on the paper. You can see one already built at the Antitronics space – I’ll be there this afternoon.
Auction Info (pdf).

Two Introduction to Arduino kits and lessons. These each include an Arduino Duemlanove, some assorted extras, and a free lesson.
Auction Info (pdf).

Update: Here’s a link to some of the awesome artwork available at the auction.

We had a great arduino class on Saturday – it went a lot faster than I expected, and I ran out of things to talk about pretty early. That may have been because we had relatively few problems getting the arduino development software installed for everyone. Cory was a hero for bringing the windows version on a CD, because the network bandwidth went to almost nothing just as we needed a copy.

I meant to talk more about the history of the Arduino project and about open source, but I failed to prepare and didn’t cover it well. Next time I’ll do better.

All the material we covered came from examples supplied with the arduino platform, and they worked for everyone. An unexpected moment that I really enjoyed was when I pulled out the Oscilloscope to show what the Pulse Width Modulated (PWM) signal looked like. This is definitely staying in the class. There were a few notes that I made on the whiteboard, and didn’t give anyone copies to take home. So that there’s no confusion about hooking up the extra parts from the class, I’ve reproduced those notes here on the wiki.

Cory also asked an interesting question about using the arduino to trigger a photographic strobe. I reverted to to bad engineering behavior, and forgot that this was an intro course, and gave an answer that was probably discouraging. I realized I had lost my way when I heard myself saying “interrupt driven”. I’ll attempt to make a topic out of this for this wiki in the next day or so. But – the important thing is to go ahead and try that idea – it’s really easy to mock something up with the arduino platform. In fact, here’s a posting by someone who has played with triggering a strobe, and shared his project. I love sharing.

The class is full

If you want to take the class but didn’t get in, send an email
and I’ll schedule another one soon.

It’s on – an Introduction to Arduino Class

Where: Antitronics – Flying Monkey Arts Center
When: Saturday, October 3rd 4:30 – 7:00
Cost: $30 (for the things you get to keep)

Requirements:

Let me know in advance if you will be there.
You need to bring your laptop, let me know which O.S. you run.

I have in my hot little hands a stack of Arduino Duemilanove boards. For your $30 you will get one of those, a USB cable, a 9V battery clip with a plug, a couple of LEDs and resistors. and a potentiometer. I will not supply a 9V battery. You won’t need one for class – you only need one later if you want to run your project disconnected from your computer.

The goals will be:

1. To get the arduino software environment installed
2. To demonstrate the structure of a basic arduino application
3. To show how to read information from the real world
4. To control some simple outputs, including PWM (and an explanation of what the heck PWM is anyway).

We will not go into deep details of the AVR processor or any other technical aspects of the arduino and how it works — this is sort of an appliance operator’s view.

Arduino home: http://www.arduino.cc/
The Duemilanove: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardDuemilanove
The Software: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Software

You are invited to go ahead and install the software before the class if you are comfortable with that. If you want the hardware early, just pay me and it’s yours. I should have the remainder of the items (battery clips) in by next week.

Registration is limited since this is the first class. I don’t want to end up overloaded.

The class is full

RSVP to info [at] antitronics [dot] com