Arduino simplicity

[Terry Fox]

I have to say that I am impressed with the Arduino and the associated development GUI.  I bought an Uno board a few weeks ago, and was able to blink an LED in just a couple of minutes.

I got an ethernet shield last week, and was blinking an LED again in less than ten minutes, this time being controlled over the ethernet, using my iPad.  No hassles in building this code at all!

Next, I decided to try to drive some of my X10 home lighting.  I had an old X10 PSC-05 power-line interface, and found that there was already an X10 library for the Arduino.  This time, it was more of a hassle to build the “sketch”, about half an hour.  This was because the X10 library was written for an earlier version of the dev GUI.  A little googling solved the problem pretty quickly.  Now, I can flash a desklamp through the X10 interface and house wiring.

Next comes combining the ethernet shield with the X10 library, so I can control my house lighting from my iPad.  Then, I can turn off a computer that runs 24/7 to do that same chore.

It is very cool to be able to build stuff so quickly.  No major hassles with software compatibility, just a minor one.
73s
Terry, WB4JFI
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://amrad.org/pipermail/tacos/attachments/20120121/f424477d/attachment.html>