Dev8D 2010

I am very excited to be running five Arduino Workshops at Dev8D 2010 in London this week.

I’ll be running three hands-on Beginner’s Workshops on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. The electronics will not require a lot of knowledge, it’ll assume that folks remember there are two connections on a battery, and they are different. I’ll be using my favoured, ultra low-cost, Maplin breadboards, so we won’t be soldering. We’ll provide Arduino’s (Feeduino’s), electronic components and tools.

I’ve run these before, and I believe we can do most of the core Arduino language, and build some electronics, in a few hours. We’ll write programs for digital input and output, analogue input and output (PWM), and use the Arduino millisecond and microsecond clock. The electronics will be LEDs, squeaky speaker, resistors, potentiometers, light sensors, and lots of wire :-).

I’ll be running a couple of ‘Advanced Arduino Workshops’ on Thursday and Friday afternoon. We’ll use a small driver chip to power a motor (or 100+ LEDs), use ‘time division multiplexing’ to drive many more LEDs than an Arduino has pins (without using any external electronics), and recognising Infra Red Remote Control signals. These are all based on things people ask me about, so I hope they are useful. We’ll provide Arduino’s (Feeduino’s), electronic components and tools.

If you really want to drive motors in an even fancier way, get hold of an L293D, and we can experiment with that too. If you have something that responds to Infrared Remote Control, bring it and it’s control along, and we can drive it from the Arduino (if the data to generate the Infrared signal is on the web, we don’t need a control. For example, the specification for things like Nikon camera’s are available, and we can work the rest out ourselves).

I’ll be around all day Saturday, so if anyone wants some help, or wants to try any of the ‘Advanced’ projects, please come find me.

Hello World – Blink.

Welcome to Ourduino. It’s been a long time coming, and I hope we have fun together.

I’ll be writing about the Arduino experiments we’ve been doing at Whitley Abbey School in Coventry, Birmingham Hack Space, and my ‘lab’.

I gain inspiration and energy from friends, the school students, my friends and colleagues at Micromouse.com, the Birmingham Hackspace, fizzPop, the Open Source community, especially the Arduino community, and last, but definitely not least, the Imagineering Web charity.

I found using Arduino so liberating that I hope to tempt other folks into experimenting with Arduino’s. It’d be great if you’d like to get involved helping others use this type of technology. If you live in this area of the UK, come join us at Birmingham Hackspace.

Some of my posts will explain practical projects – making electronics and programming micro-controllers. I hope you will improve anything you find here, and share it with all of us.

One of the projects will be the Nikon Infrared Remote Control we built at the Birmingham Hack Space, fizzPop.

I’ll also describe the “Introduction to Robotics” experimental projects we’ve built at school too.

Blink? Blink is the ‘Hello World’ of embedded programming 🙂

PS – I’ll set up my Ourduino domain when I get around to it.