After thinking about getting an Arduino for a while, I finally got around to getting one from oomlout. I purchased the budget pack, so it came with the Arduino, various length wires, LEDs, resistors, a couple of switches, two potentiometers and a photo resistor. So in all enough to get me started. I thought it was a nice touch that it came with a protoboard and plastic base to screw the arduino and the protoboard on.
Developing for the arduino is quite easy, so long as you know C/C++, they provide a library that simplifies all of the operations like setting pins and receiving input. You can download the IDE from the here. I did find a few posts that explained how to develop using Xcode, but I couldn’t get it working in the end.
After playing around with the bits and pieces in the kit, I purchased an 8x8 LED display, cost £2.50 so nothing to baulk at. My goal with this is to build a little breakout game. An issue I came across was that the arduino didn’t have enough output pins to operate the display, so I picked up a pack of 5 shift registers. These allow you to use 3 pins on the arduino and output to 8 pins. On top of this you daisy chain the shift registers together, again there are nice functions for operating the shift registers.
I’ll post next on some of the circuits and sketches that can be used for quick tutorials on using some of the bits and pieces.