Do You Arduino?A couple guys see if they can make anything cool with Arduino

OK, so this has taken longer than I was hoping to get some real content up here, but I recently bought something that I thought I would share.

I’ve been doing some research on an idea for a project for another hobby of mine, high power rocketry. (I will have an upcoming post that will talk about my idea in great detail.) During my research I found some glowing reviews for an O’Reilly book, Arduino Cookbook by Michael Margolis. After a couple of minutes after opening the book, I can completely understand the reason for the glowing reviews.

Simply put, I’ve always felt that there were plenty of sites that continually have some very good information about the Arduino & projects for the Arduino. The only problem is that the documentation can often be inconsistent & vary widely in quality. Also, It’s a challenge to refer back to some of those pages as a point of reference.

The Arduino Cookbook is exceptionally thorough, laid out in a very logical manner, & the documentation is consistently strong throughout. Best of all, it’s altogether in a single volume that is easy to keep in arm’s reach. And that’s a good thing because the depth of components it covers is impressive. Remember in my last post how I talked about how excited I was about my new ethernet shield? Well, aside from a surprisingly underwhelming number of projects online, there is an entire chapter with 16 “recipes” on everything from getting started with the ethernet shield to serving up HTML pages to interacting with other websites. There are entire chapters dedicated to wireless communication, audio output, & using displays just to whet your appetite for the wealth of content found in the 600+ pages.

And I should take a moment to explain the “recipe” concept. The idea is that while it gives you full sketches to make each point, the explanations inspire you to bridge the gap between the chapters to combine elements of the sketches together to do something new, let’s say like, make a webserver that allows visitors to control a servo. And like a good cookbook, the recipes at the end of the cookbook are built upon the concepts found at the beginning.

The Arduino Cookbook would be a sound investment for anyone just starting out as well as most intermediates, & pretty much anyone who wants to interface with some new hardware for the first time. It won’t collect much dust on a bookshelf because you’ll certainly be thumbing its pages on a frequent basis.

Since yesterday was Father’s Day, I was left to my own devices for a while so that I could do something(s) that Ijust hadn’t the time or chance to get around to… One of those was building a LED scrolling matrix. I had always admired the 8×56 matrix over at Adventures of Arduino and Me. Thankfully, he had taken the time to craft his sketch so that you could duplicate his efforts with as few as two 8×8 LED matrices. While I had enough components to make up to an 8×80, I do not have enough hook-up wires. The best I could do is what you see here: a 8×24. While there lacked some precision in the instructions, that actually worked out to my benefit in the long run since that meant I had to do a little research among my components’ data sheets to verify all the pinouts. Taking my time & being consistent almost certainly contributed greatly to my success as I didn’t have any major issues assembling the hardware–just the occasional resistors touching one another was the extent of any problems.

Then once I had it all together, I noticed that the “font” characters were only 5×7–the top row wasn’t being used. A little searching around led me to a dot matrix font generator over at Instructables.com. I had to convert the hex values in the spreadsheet to decimal, but it was worth the effort.

Word of advice for anyone looking to replicate this project: Definitely make sure to follow the links to the arduino.cc forum. The original sketch along with an invaluable hand-drawn circuit diagram can be found there.

You tell me how it looks…

And yes, as soon as I have more hook-up wire, I’m definitely going to see how big I can make this matrix!
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