I spent the weekend visiting my brother and his family in his holiday home out in the countryside. It was great to see my two little nephews again. The younger one is now 3 and the last time I saw him he was still being pushed around in a pram. Now the child is tearing around the place and has zero concept of self-preservation; cuts and scrapes everywhere. I had to physically restrain him at one point from riding his bicycle down a set of stairs. I don't know how my brother and sister in law manage to keep up with the child. In other news, the Arduino I ordered came early yesterday. Right now I'm just blinking LEDs on and off and controlling them with buttons and switches. Once I master LEDs I'll be ready for NASA, I reckon.
Which Arduino did you get? It's something I've been interested in since forever and now I regret waiting as they've had a huge falling out, one of the original team went and copyrighted it in the US or something I don't know... just seems to be a big ol' mess now. I'm sure you're probably already familiar with Adafruit which has some good Arduino content, but please do share if you come across any tutorials/guides/hacks/projects that you like or find useful... maybe there's a #arduino?
I got the Arduino Uno Rev 3. I didn't realize that there was drama about the Arduino, but then again, I'm pretty out of the loop with that kind of thing. It's just something that would come up in conversation with friends, and looking at some of the projects it looked like a lot of fun to get into. Thanks for the link to Adafruit! I recognized the name and saw their stuff being sold on Amazon, but I didn't know there were tutorials on there. A lot of it looks like it'll be really useful in the next few weeks. I've mainly been working with a little kit I bought with the Arduino which has a bunch of tutorials, resistors, LEDs, a servo, and other goodies. It's a Sunfounder kit, if that's helpful at all :). Also, this guy's tutorials have been really helpful so far. It would be awesome to start a #arduino! I often browse /r/Arduino on Reddit just to look at all the awesome projects.
This Hackaday article (also a great site for projects) seems to paint the Italian company as the bad guys, but the first I heard of this painted a different picture -- a lone team member usurping the US trademark from under them. I'll see if I can find that article to give a balanced view. Edit: It seems there's been a lot more recent posts under the Hackaday Arduino vs Arduino category. Those should give a more balanced view of things. Either way: Crazy stuff! We should make a cross-platform tag too so things can be posted to both that and the platform specific one as I don't know if I'll be picking up an Arduino or sticking with the #microbit or what have you. I hope to! Maybe #hardware would be a good fit?
Huh. Weird. I could have sworn there was a #diy tag already but when I clicked the one in your comment, it led to nothing. Apparently tags are case sensitive. #diy style posts are awesome. This community has a ton of creative people constantly making art and what have you. I think it would be great if some people would take step by step photos of their creative process, letting us in on the development of their work.
I did that with a special bookbinding I did a while ago, and people seemed to like it. I don't know if I used #diy for it though. It would have been more of a #hobbski thing I think. I fixed up a straight razor yesterday and put it there too, but that's pretty boring. It'd be cool to maybe see how the music club does their thing, or some of the wood workers here.
The first project I did out of college was monitoring for commercial AC instillations using Arduinos with SquidBee shields. I haven't kept up with Arduino since then, but getting a working proof of concept out of a $200 trip to Radio Shack and a 50 line perl script was awesome.