electronics

While not my first microcontroller this is my first Arduino. I've been playing with PIC controllers loaded with the PICAXE bootloader for a while, probably out of some sick sense of nostalgia for the assembler class I took on the Motorola 68000 back in college. I quickly grew tired of managing bytes, words and double words and doing decimal maths the long way so I wandered over to see what the Arduino was all about.

The Arduino is noticeable because it has received a lot of attention lately and for good reason. The Arduino platform has exposed microcontrollers to the masses and has made it cheap. Both economically and in terms of learning time. For about $40 you can be writing code for your microcontroller and turning on and off LEDs -- for $60 you can be up and experimenting with most of the Arduino's base functionality with Sparkfun's Starter Kit for Arduino (a great kit and a great timesaver).

Once you have your Arduino the only other piece that is required is the Arduino IDE and the drivers to make your USB connection look like a serial port. The IDE is a java application so it is pretty painless, the FTDI USB Drivers are included in the IDE distribution and your windows machine should be able to find and install them automatically when you plug in the Arduino for the first time -- the OS X install is almost as painless.

To continue you'll need your Arduino, a USB cable, the IDE and drivers installed and an LED. Open up the Arduino IDE, follow along and we'll create the microcontroller equivalent of a 'Hello World' program.

With prices for benchtop power supplies hovering around $150 for an entry level unit most electronics hobbyists, such as myself, tend to rely on a multitude of wall warts and USB powered serial breakout boards for supplying power to our projects during development. When I saw the Benchtop Power Board Kit last week while browsing the Sparkfun site my nether region was all a tingle -- a benchtop power supply that uses an ATX power unit from a PC. For $15!

I can't say I was a bundle of anticipation waiting for my package from Sparkfun. With Spring quickly moving into Summer and the garden planting half finished my electronics to-do list has been collecting dust. However, the notion was growing that this kit (once completed) would solve a lot of my project slow downs and I began soldering as soon as it arrived.

The board itself is well laid out and there are only a handful of parts so the kit doesn't require much in the way of thought to assemble. You will need to provide your own solid core wire to connect the binding posts to the board. I completed the kit in about 15 minutes, dusted off an old ATX power supply, plugged it in and fired the thing up. Voltages measured almost right on the money on each rail. This is a pretty slick unit -- now I only need some time to get back to that electronics to-do list.

[Some discussion has been made about static minimum loads on ATX power supplies and that a lack of static loads may make your PSU go *poof* with the requisite amount of smoke and sparks. See some additional discussion here.]

While pricing parts for a simple LED project I came across this. While it isn't the pinnacle of aesthetics I must admit that it is the best piece of wearable electronics I have seen to date.

Now I've another reason to envy rodeo riders besides the ball-crushing bull rides and the leather chaps.