News

News News 2010-06-16 22:Jun:th 2010-06-16 22:Jun:th http://www.practicalarduino.com jon@oxer.com.au Copyright 2010 Practical Arduino Wed, 16 Jun 2010 22:07:53 +1000 Wed, 16 Jun 2010 22:07:53 +1000 http://www.practicalarduino.com/news/id/761 Freetronics TwentyTen is here

Posted by Jonathan Oxer

It's kinda old news now but I totally forgot to post about the Freetronics TwentyTen! Things have been so busy that I haven't been updating the Practical Arduino site as often as I should, so sorry about that.

So without further ado, here it is: our version of the Arduino Duemilanove, but with a bunch of improvements applied.

The basic philosophy we followed when designing the TwentyTen (which is named in homage to the Arduino Duemilanove, which means "2009" in Italian) was that we wanted to stay true to the original spirit of the Duemilanove while fixing a few things that bugged us about it. Our little thought-experiment was "what would we want the successor to the Duemilanove to look like?"

I could write a heap more about it, but it's already well written up on the Freetronics site so please check it out there!

www.freetronics.com/twentyten

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 21:28:46 +1000 Wed, 16 Jun 2010 21:28:46 +1000 http://www.practicalarduino.com/news/id/751 Talking Poker Timer

Posted by Jonathan Oxer

Practical Arduino reader Pat James has used the Speech Synthesizer project in a creative way: he's linked it to a timer for tracking poker game rounds. He and his buddies have a weekly Texas Hold 'Em tournament with 20 minute limit per round, and they needed a way to keep track of how long each round has taken.

See more on Pat's blog.

Mon, 31 May 2010 16:37:10 +1000 Mon, 31 May 2010 16:37:10 +1000 http://www.practicalarduino.com/news/id/741 Weather Station Receiver shield now available from Freetronics

Posted by Jonathan Oxer

The Weather Station Receiver project has been crazy-popular, and now you can buy a pre-assembled 433MHz Receiver Shield from Freetronics so you don't even have to build the circuit yourself. Just plug it in, load the sketch into your Arduino, and away you go.

Even better, the Freetronics version of the shield uses an RXB6 module instead of the RXB1 that we used in the original project.

The RXB6 is a multi-mode module with better sensitivity than the RXB1, and by loading different firmware it can operate in different ways. The Freetronics shields are fitted with an RXB6 running on firmware that makes it behave in the same way as an RXB1 so it remains fully compatible with the original design while giving the advantage of greater sensitivity.

Check them out: Freetronics 433MHz Receiver Shield for Arduino.

Tue, 04 May 2010 21:55:34 +1000 Tue, 04 May 2010 21:55:34 +1000 http://www.practicalarduino.com/news/id/731 Modelling river systems with Arduino water flow gauge Posted by Jonathan Oxer

Yet another spin-off I could never have predicted is a group in Illinois who have used the water flow gauge project in a river-system simulator. This is uber-cool:

As Steve Gough mentions in the blog post "Open source science tools at LLRD", river simulators normally require use of US$600 flow gauges and being able to do the same thing for about $75 with an Arduino and a few other parts is a big deal.

Check out their excellent work at emriver.com. Tue, 27 Apr 2010 10:57:24 +1000 Tue, 27 Apr 2010 10:57:24 +1000 http://www.practicalarduino.com/news/id/721 Joystick shield for Arduino MAME controller Posted by Jonathan Oxer

I have a Google Alert set on the term "Practical Arduino", and it often finds me very cool things that people have done using projects described in the book. One of those tidbits was this:

batchpcb.com/index.php/Products/31584

I don't know anything much about it other than what's shown on that page, but from what I can deduce it's the circuit from the Virtual USB Keyboard project converted into a nice PCB with a bunch of buttons included for controlling games running under the arcade machine emulator MAME.

I love seeing stuff like this, so if you've created anything based on things you've learnt from Practical Arduino please send me an email and tell me all about it! Fri, 09 Apr 2010 11:26:49 +1000 Fri, 09 Apr 2010 11:26:49 +1000 http://www.practicalarduino.com/news/id/711 Weather Station Receiver project modified for La Crosse TX4U Posted by Jonathan Oxer

When whittling down the list of projects for Practical Arduino I never expected the Weather Station Receiver project to be one that gained so much attention. To be honest I was dubious about whether enough people would build it to justify its inclusion, but felt that even if it wasn't built very often it was still worthwhile as an example of how to do signal timing analysis and bitstream decoding.

I'm glad we put it in, because it seems to be one of the more popular projects!

Reader Kelsey Jordahl contacted me yesterday with details of a modified version that reads data from a La Crosse TX4U system, using the circuit from Practical Arduino but with modified software to deal with the different data format.

Kelsey's system logs the data and generates nice-looking graphs that are displayed online.

For more information (including the modified source code) check out:

mysite.verizon.net/kajordahl/weather.html

mysite.verizon.net/kajordahl/weather/weather.html

Oh yeah, and this is probably a good time to mention that Freetronics is now stocking fully pre-assembled Arduino shields for the Weather Station Receiver project. The very first one was sold and shipped to a reader in Queensland, Australia, yesterday morning.

The shield implements exactly the same circuit as shown in Practical Arduino, but with a dedicated PCB design rather than using a protoshield.

There's more info on the 433MHz Receiver Shield for Arduino page at the Freetronics site. Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:34:53 +1000 Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:34:53 +1000 http://www.practicalarduino.com/news/id/701 Arduino shield standards Posted by Jonathan Oxer

A few weeks ago I wrote about Andrew Oke's efforts at standardizing comms for Arduino shields, which many people have since told me is a great idea.

Andrew has now written up his guidelines and put it up on his website, so if you're doing any shield design I highly recommend you check it out:

Arduino Shield Design Standards

Andrew's guidelines are oriented around making sure shields are stackable by keeping them physically low and also using comms that don't make shields mutually exclusive. I've written in the past (and ranted a bit in video blogs) about other rules I think all shield designers should observe, such as marking pin use on the overlay. Hopefully we'll see more shields start to observe these sorts of Best Practice guidelines - many already do, but an awful lot don't. Including many of my early attempts, but at least I'm getting better! Mon, 15 Feb 2010 10:26:39 +1000 Mon, 15 Feb 2010 10:26:39 +1000 http://www.practicalarduino.com/news/id/691 Slides and code from Justin Mclean's Arduino Miniconf talk Posted by Jonathan Oxer

One of the many excellent presentations at the recent Arduino Miniconf in Wellington, New Zealand, was Justin Mclean's "Putting your device in the browser and on the web". Justin's talk demonstrated use of a Flash object in a browser displaying data acquired by an Arduino, and also controlling the Arduino based on user actions. It was a really impressive demo because the latency was so small: in one demo, quite rapid analog samples were pushed to a dynamically updating graph that scrolled across the screen.

Justin has put his slides and example code up on his blog. He's also doing a talk at the Web Standards Group in Sydney on February 24th, so if you're in town make sure you go along. He's a great speaker with some excellent tech to demonstrate so it'll be well worth it. Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:44:08 +1000 Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:44:08 +1000 http://www.practicalarduino.com/news/id/681 Project kits from Toys Down Under - with a twist Posted by Jonathan Oxer

This morning while looking for other things on the Toys Down Under site I discovered that they've now listed kits for a few Practical Arduino projects: the Appliance Remote Control, the Virtual USB Keyboard, the PS/2 Keyboard / Mouse, the Touch Control Panel, and the Speech Synthesizer. That in itself is quite cool but what's really interesting is that they're offering them as "spec your own kit" fully customisable packages.

Rather than just a regular kit containing every part as you'd expect, they've set a base price of $0 for every kit and then made all the parts in the kits optional. They've also listed a few extras such as a Duemilanove and an Arduino Starter Kit as optional parts.

That's really cool because it gives you lots of flexibility. If you already have an Arduino and most of the parts required for a specific project you can order just what you're missing, or at the other end of the scale you can start with nothing and order every single part plus an Arduino, giving you everything you need all in one convenient package.

Clever. Check it out:

toysdownunder.com/arduino/kits/practical-arduino-kits.html

It must be a total pain for them to manage inventory (not to mention pick-n-pack) when doing it this way, but from the customer's point of view it's brilliant. Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:01:01 +1000 Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:01:01 +1000 http://www.practicalarduino.com/news/id/671 Weather Station Receiver project modified for Jaycar weather station Posted by Jonathan Oxer

Reader Kayne Richens from Melbourne/Australia built the Weather Station Receiver hardware as described in the book, but because he has a different type of weather station the original software wouldn't work. With the assistance of Marc Alexander (one of our Tech Reviewers for the book and author of the original Weather Station Receiver software) he modified the software to allow it to process data from a BIOS/Thermor DG950R weather station purchased from Jaycar.

You can learn more about it on his blog at kayno.net/2010/01/15/arduino-weather-station-receiver-shield/.

Great work, Kayne!