Arduino

Recently I acquired an Arduino Duemilanove. I realize a lot of you probably think I'm coming to the party a bit late but I'm an embedded systems developer by profession and I have all sorts of code snippets for various micros, in-circuit programmers, etc. In short, I've just never had a need to pay extra for a board with a bootloader and software libraries.

A new project came up and it's a "one off" that didn't really justify a custom circuit board, etc. I was searching for reasonable priced boards that used the Atmel AVR processors and was reminded of the Arduinos while looking through the Sparkfun Electronics web site. If you ignore for a moment that they are the Arduino design and have their bootloader the fact is several of these boards are less than $18US in single quantities! They use either the Atmel AVR ATMega168 (16K) or ATMega328 (32K) micro so they are fairly capable in bare form at a price that's hard to beat.

When my board arrived I decided to have a look at the Arduino software and programming environment. I have to say there are some nice looking features and my plan right now is to try things out by using it for this current project.

One more thing that's very cool about Arduino... not only is the development environment, compiler, etc. freely available but it is available in Windows, Linux, and Macintosh formats so you can easily program on your computing platform of choice.

I will report more observations as things progress.

73,

Tim, N9PUZ