Build your own dorkbotPDX Arduino Kit

From Parts...

To Programmed Micro Controller

What:

You know you've been sitting there thinking "why don't those two weeks go by faster? I *NEED* my DorkbotPDX fix, now!"

Well, I'm here to tell you that your wait is nearly over. In just 4 days time you can satisfy that need to hang out and socialize (a frightening concent, I know) with other freaks and geeks. Of course, I know there's a lot of newcomers out there, so don't be afraid -- we don't bite (well, Don might, but I'll leave that one for you to find out).

Bring your toys, your ideas and most of all your ability to have fun. We take all kinds and we don't turn anyone away.

Introduction.

The Benito Board is an at90USB162 board intended for use in programming and communicating with microcontrollers which have serial based bootloaders.

Among those are the Phillips lpc21xx series ARM chips, the Dallas Semiconductor, DS500x family and Atmels using any number of STK500 compatible bootloaders.

Current order goes out: may 5th for distribution at the may 12th meeting

Items currently on order:

mouser:
none

Digikey:
none

___________________________________________________

How this works:

I have been coordinating a batch style group order to the various
component distributors.
I will be accepting parts lists to go into a group order to Digikey,

I sent my son to his mom's with one of the USB Serial boards I built along with a breadboard, an RBBA a pile of resistors and an led array. I thought about this arrangement and decided that I would try to build a breadboard attached programmer that would not be dangling off the edge of the board and in the way.

Ok, sorry if this spiel sounds familiar... I'm going on fumes at the moment and just wanted to get this out:

It's time again to break out the breadboards, shine up the solder joints and light up the LEDs with your good friends in DorkbotPDX. We'll be meeting once again to mull over strange ideas (involving electricity, of course), hash out plans for world domination and, as always, drink beer. Come join us, bring along a project if you have one and can fit it in your preferred mode of transport, and make yourself known to your fellow Portland dorks.

When: Monday, April 14th, 7pm

Last weekend I built an RBBB board that I bought at DorkbotPDX 0x01. This is the cheapest way to get into an Arduino that I know of. And pretty much the cheapest microcontroller setup you can get. Thanks guys who put these kits together for us locally! I had never done anything with Arduino before (hardly even with microcontrollers) so this offered a low entry fee and great support.

I had some 2-line LCDs I had bought a few weeks ago from Electronics Goldmine for $1.79. They aren't backlit but they are so cheap it just seemed like a good thing to have. One painful thing about Hitachi 44780-based LCD displays is that they use a LOT of IO pins to display stuff. 8bit mode uses all of the digital pins on the Arduino. 4bit mode still uses a lot. I saw some other solutions like using a shift register to bring it down to two pins. But the simplicity of of Serial LCDs was really appealing, so I thought I'd rig one up using the RBBB as a controller. Any future projects that need an LCD can then just talk serially to the Arduino LCD controller and very little is needed to make things work.

Serial LCD after bootup.

Thanks to the wonderful efforts of Mark, Jason and Jared, we now have videos up of the proceedings from DorkbotPDX 0x01. Check them out here: http://www.vimeo.com/album/10961

Also, there's now a Vimeo channel for DorkbotPDX, too, which will be the place to see all sorts of videos from the various goings on of our fine group: http://www.vimeo.com/dorkbotpdx