The new toy

Okay, it's not really new. The last few months I've been toying around a bit with it, and I think I sort of understand the basic idea now.





This is Boarduino, a clone of open-source dev/prototyping-platform Arduino. It can do everything Arduino can do, and can be plugged directly into a breadboard, which makes it a lot easier to keep track of where the different wires of your little project are actually going to.


Well, sort of. Don't go and plug multiple projects into one board.

In the above picture, the first project is well underway (it's an RGB moodlight), but there still a bunch of little problems to tackle. Here's a video of it:

Where was I?

Right. So much for actually posting something about the Olimex board.

After some fiddling around with it, I found out -with a bit of help from the internets- how to get LEDs to blink and how to work a shift register.
There were 2 problems, though: I couldn't get the inputs to work properly (there seemed to be some flicker which caused the thing to register a button-click multiple times, a lot of the time), and it works at 3.3V, which didn't make it very compatible with some other stuff (yeah, both are blue/white, which used to be the proverbial bomb when I ordered them a couple of years ago) I had lying around.

But it had captured my interest, and after finding out about a fun project called Arduino, specifically Ladyada's breadboard-pluggable clone, Boarduino, I decided to switch platforms.

Right now I've got 2 little projects, the first of which is a Moodlight-type device.

So, here I go again, maybe this time the blog will stay alive. The projects will, anyway, and I've actually gotten somewhere so far. And it helps having a friend who's also just started messing with uCs to compete discuss ideas and possibilities with every once in a while ;).

The blog is dead. Long live the blog.

Marvin works quite well, though. But I've rediscovered an old toy, which is shinier (read: it has more I/O ports): an Olimex MSP430F1121 dev-kit.


It has an ultra-low-power TI processor and 14 I/O-ports, which should be enough to connect that old LCD I found in the projects-bin.

So. next project: try to get that MSP430 devboard to work. And then attach the LCD and some rotary encoders to it.

I might actually post/rant some more or less useful info here. Or I'll just forget about this thing again, we'll have to wait and see about that.