Everybody run! It's a Blog!

Well, I never thought I'd be writing a blog. Writing blogs is like scattering your thoughts to the wind. A very powerful wind at that. Anyway, this blog is about all the things I make in my new hobby. I've been posting all of my previous creations on Facebook, but it wasn't a very good outlet for this kind of stuff, and probably just clogged up peoples' News Feeds. Call it what you want: physical computing, electronics, programming; it all boils down to my adventures with this guy:

This is the Arduino Uno. It is an open-source microcontroller that uses an Atmel ATmega328 microprocessor as its "brains." The Arduino has 13 digital input/output pins (6 of which are PWM, more on that later) and 6 analog input pins. There are also some power pins that you can power small circuits with.


To make the Arduino do what you want, you basically plug it into your computer and start programming away. Luckily in college I took a course in C programming, which just so happens to be the programming language that Arduino "sketches" are written in. Here is a snapshot of the Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment) where I write all my code:

As you may or may not have seen, I've already crafted a bunch of things that utilize the Arduino:

• Anemometer
• Temperature Logger
• Infrared sensor with remote control hacking
• LCD display
• Binary Counter

I may come back to those in future posts and kinda go through them, but I'll likely move on to bigger and better things. Right now I'm working on a tabletop CNC milling machine. It is a massive undertaking for me, because I'm basically starting from scratch and Arduino-based milling machines are pretty sparse on the intertubes. I think I'll save that project for my next post.


For more information on Arduino or if you want to know what the dickens I'm talking about, here is the Arduino website.