Arduino starter kit

[ryan74]

I want to get a breadboard to build circuits for fun and was thinking about getting a starter kit from arduino.
http://www.arduino.cc/
What do you guys think?
Other suggestions?

I'm pretty new to electronics and circuits but I have managed to fix or diagnose over 20 lcd tv problems.

Sorry if I posted in the wrong spot.

[Mad_Professor]

Re: Arduino starter kit

when I was building my arduino fan controller, I built my own arduino more like hackduino. I got atmega168 chip and the needed components like voltage regulator and decoupling caps with an inductor,
*I didn't need the oscillator since the onboard 8mhz did fine for my application* and a basic electronic breadboard *you know these things http://itp.nyu.edu/physcomp/uploads/breadboard.jpg * , then I did the Parallel Port Programmer method.
Actually I just used a male to female extension cable and cut some cat-6 wire and just strip and shove them in the female end and then wrap those to resistors then plug them into the breadboard, actually to the pin outs of the atmega chip, I didn't feel like splicing.

I then wrote the code in arduino then used avrdude to upload it to the chip bypassing the need for a bootloader and USB/serial ISP port.

It worked out well for 6 months and then I end up upgrading the server that this fan controller was being used in.

Depending on what you need it to do you might have to set the fuses, I didn't, the stock settings were ok for me.

Here are some links

http://upvector.com/atmega/
http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Standalone
http://www.ladyada.net/learn/avr/avrdude.html
http://www.arduino.cc/en/Hacking/Par...llelProgrammer

If you need the hex for setting fuses through avrdude.
http://www.engbedded.com/fusecalc/

Hope this helps.

[mariushm]

Re: Arduino starter kit

An arduino is a quick and fast way to do something, but it hides a few things from you and simplifies others.

If you want to actually learn something, it's more useful to get the the chips themselves and a programmer (plenty third party usb or serial programmers that are cheap) and do your own programming.

I actually got myself a PICkit 3 with a demo board for around 60$ - it's a kit Microchip sells - precisely because I didn't want to be a sheep succumbing to using ready made code for arduino and because PIC chips are generally more readily available at distributors.

PIC chips are a different architecture than Atmega (MIPS on PICs, AVR on Atmel) and the chips in Arduino, can be let's say 90-95% as fast (depending on what chip you use) and feature wise some PIC chips have more features than AT* ones.

And they're easy to initialize from C code, to write c only (or inline asm), the datasheets are very detailed so no problem using them etc

Once I have more experience with programming microncontrollers, I plan on just jumping to ARM based microcontrollers - these are faster, have generally open source compilers (gcc) but can be a bit more difficult to set up a development environment for (configuring gcc, linkers, setting them up in open source IDEs like eclipse etc), they need more initialization code so more work to start them, and they're generally not available in through hole/breadboard formats so you have to get either adapters or make your own tiny pcbs on which you solder them during development.

[ryan74]

Re: Arduino starter kit

An arduino is a quick and fast way to do something, but it hides a few things from you and simplifies others.
If you want to actually learn something, it's more useful to get the the chips themselves, a programmer and do your own programming.

-I do want to learn something(part of why I wanted something like this).
Maybe theres a better educational electronics kit someone knows of but I dont want a kit meant for kids unless it is good. Something for beginner to moderate exp..
-I understand how some components(caps,resistors, fets) work but not all.
I have a partial knowledge of components and testing them.
No knowledge of theory really.
Iam better at learning while doing(hands on)

-Im also looking at books but what I find are too advanced or meant for little kids.
I wish I knew the book we used in high school, it had simple explanations/diagrams, written tests per chapter, and lab instructions. It was a great book for learning. It covered everything from what a fuse does to basic programming and theory.
Unfortunatly I don't remember much from 20 yrs ago and it is a little harder to remember things I learn now due to age and mostly my past drug addiction when I was younger so a college/advanced book might be too difficult to start with.