November fun and the Arduino Uno

So now that it has been another month I thought it its time to give an update. So Halloween was my youngest daughters first birthday and now I am getting all excited about the holiday again. I just started with arduino uno and reworked the guts of a weird pumpkin thing we bought a few years back. I have also started planning for something awesome for next year. I thought about looking at these for a while but thought they were really pricey, then I found out they had them local at Micro Center for $19.99 (now $17.99). I picked up the starter kit and have had so much fun playing with the thing.

For Christmas I am also working on a project to make Christmas tree lights do stuff to music. This project is a merger of a few others I have found on the web. The project that started me thinking about getting one of these was posted a year or so back on slashdot and can be found here.  One of the other plans I am using to start my Christmas tree plan off is this one. I think I am going to start with a 4 channel relay so I only have 4 strands on the tree at a time but we will see.

After getting back into this stuff I remember how fun circuitry is and am looking forward to making all sorts of stuff. Once I have one of my projects finalized and off the breadboard I will post how I did it with pictures/videos. For now I can't do much more until I get a soldering iron again. I am thankful that I didn't get rid of my fluke over the last several years.

As I mentioned before my blog is going to be more tech focused and it looks like that move is more hardware than anyone would have thought. So pictures videos and diagrams are going to be coming in the not so distant future.

If you want to know more about arduino check out their site at http://arduino.cc also check out my new favorite online store adafruit.com. There are also some great instructions all over the internet and a lot to see at instructables.com in the arduino section.