...and down the rabbit hole we go

[Leevibe]

I got an arduino uno as a late Christmas present. Yay! Now I have a whole bunch of learning to do. At the very least I want to be able to make a PWM motor control and build a pickup winder.

Other ideas?

[alanp]

A robot to play guitar?

[sturgeo]

Program ATtinys for soft touch relay boards

[juansolo]

An AI to realise that humans are a virus that needs to be irradicated?

[Jopn]

I keep meaning to get around to mine, although my arduino is built on vero with parts from Tayda...

My plan was to try to do a guitar tuner.  I think there's a project or two out there for that.

[RobA]

Project 1: Make LED's blink.
Project 2: Make LED's blink somehow responding to switches and pots.
Project 3: Experiment randomly.
Project 4: Learn to replace AT chip blown up in Project 3.
...

Well, that was my path anyway . I think almost everyone starts off with 1 and 2.

There are tons of robotics projects out there. I talked to someone the other day that was programming them to control the temperature of their 3D printer.

My son's looking at putting together this project to do head tracking for video games that looks cool. (It uses the small Arduino boards, but they are basically the same thing.)

Specifically for music related stuff, there's a MIDI shield available that you can use to make a MIDI processor or things like MIDI to CV. You can breadboard it yourself pretty easily too and Sparkfun has the schematics available for almost every shield they sell.

They are good for making sequencers that can control analog stuff too.

[Leevibe]

An AI to realise that humans are a virus that needs to be irradicated?

Just bought my wife a roomba. It seems to have the self awareness thing figured out

I keep meaning to get around to mine, although my arduino is built on vero with parts from Tayda...

Sounds like you're trying to build a battle droid.

[mgwhit]

Program ATtinys for soft touch relay boards

Yup.  I just ordered an Uno with a protoshield and some ATtiny85s to play around with exactly this.

[RobA]

Program ATtinys for soft touch relay boards

Yup.  I just ordered an Uno with a protoshield and some ATtiny85s to play around with exactly this.

I've got a schematic and software around somewhere where I did this with an 85 and a multi one with the 2313. My main goal was to integrate with MIDI controllers, so I haven't finished the boards yet, but if you run in to sticking points, I can dig up the schematics. One thing I found was that it was much more reliable to use a Schmitt trigger to do the debounce than to do it in software. You can get little tiny SOT Schmitt trigger IC's to use too that take up almost no board space.

[Leevibe]

So I fired it up for the first time last night. I did the obligatory LED blink but got sidetracked and ended up making a morse code message to video for a friend instead of moving on to something useful. It was fun to get it working at least.

[mgwhit]

I've got a schematic and software around somewhere where I did this with an 85 and a multi one with the 2313. My main goal was to integrate with MIDI controllers, so I haven't finished the boards yet, but if you run in to sticking points, I can dig up the schematics. One thing I found was that it was much more reliable to use a Schmitt trigger to do the debounce than to do it in software. You can get little tiny SOT Schmitt trigger IC's to use too that take up almost no board space.

Thanks for the tip!   But now I've gotta learn what a Schmitt trigger is....  It's funny, I think half the questions on the Arduino forums are about button presses -- and nobody does anything the exact same way!

So I fired it up for the first time last night. I did the obligatory LED blink but got sidetracked and ended up making a morse code message to video for a friend instead of moving on to something useful. It was fun to get it working at least.

You probably learned something, though, and that in itself is useful. Keep having fun!

[mgwhit]

Mine showed up in the mail unexpectedly this morning.  First Class USPS in less than 48 hours, not bad!

Lee, if you haven't checked out Jeremy Blum's video tutorials yet, do yourself a favor.  They're the best I've seen so far.  His tutorial on hardware debounce with Schmitt triggers (thanks, Rob, for that tip) is excellent.

[mgwhit]

Three-mode dual-effect switching prototype:



Gonna try to move this onto an ATtiny85 tomorrow.

[Leevibe]

Three-mode dual-effect switching prototype:



Gonna try to move this onto an ATtiny85 tomorrow.

Atta boy! That's the kind of stuff I want to get into.