New Sections and Arduino's

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There are a couple new sections of this blog that I'd like to point out. There's the services section containing information for all services that I offer, the portfolio section that contains my projects that are either completed or in progress, and also a downloads section. The download section is for all project design files and programming files such as Arduino sketches and the like. I'll be continuously updating them as I go along. The first download isn't one I wrote for the Arduino but, someone else did. I thought it was extremely cool. I mean, why not program BASIC using a serial monitor with an Arduino? Now, the program ends up taking up 28 of the 32K of the Atmega328P but, you could always include a SD card for extra storage. Go ahead and mess around with it!
The Arduino Uno with an Atmega328P as the MCU

This brings me to my next point i'd like to make, if anyone and I mean anyone who wants to learn more about E.E. but doesn't know where to start, please do yourself a favour and pickup an Arduino. There are several different boards with different amounts of I/O (input, output). They're relatively cheap and you can easily program them with the Arduino environment. The reason I want to make people aware of them is this is really where I got my start with EE. They are great for quickly developing things and getting a working project off the ground. The heart of the Arduino is a MCU or microcontroller unit. A microcontroller is basically a small computer it has a built in CPU (the normal processor of a desktop computer), RAM and non volatile memory to hold programs that you flash to it.

What makes MCU's great, is that they are cheap and have so many uses. In fact, your car contains loads of them. All you have to do is flash you're program to them and you can easily embed them in different applications. The Arduino is basically an experimenter's MCU. You build a program and an application and flash the MCU and you wire up your prototype product and there you go. Now the Arduino is only one of several products like it, the Texas Instruments MSP430 is a really cheap Arduino like product. So the long short of it is, if you want to learn more about EE, pickup an Arduino and enjoy your entry into the world of electrical engineering!

Where to buy an Arduino:

Newark/Element14

Sparkfun

Radioshack

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