New Toy!

My new Arduino Mega

Long time no see folks! I got a new toy this week, an Arduino Mega. Cute lil thing isn’t it? So what is it? The Arduino is a completely open source 8bit RISC controller and board package. Part of the Arduino package is it’s fairly easy to learn library. Since it’s in C++, it’s very easy (for me) to rapidly design little hardware projects. I’ve planned that my first project will be a fan controller for my hard drives. I have two external hard drives and at times, they get a little warm, so I want to write some code for this that communicates with my laptop over USB (serial interface) as to when to turn on the drive fan or not, with manual override of course.

But this is only the surface of what you could do. There are add-ons for the Arduino by a variety of different manufacturers for wifi, ethernet, GPS, bluetooth and even GSM. While the build in Arduino functions have lots of advanced things to play with, you get full control over the processor with the avr-libc library (such as sleep modes). I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of projects I can come up with. Currently, I have two LEDs hooked up via a breadboard that fade back and forth (it has both analog in and out, via PWM) every 30 seconds, or manually if you send it the correct command over serial.