Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

You can order Arduino systems from several places, including Adafruit and Sparkfun. Both companies have lots of tutorials and howtos to get you started with Arduinos. If you’re looking for a local source to get Arduinos, try Trossen Robotics.

What you’ll get from this class: If you choose the tuition + materials option, we will have an arduino and assortment of electronics components for you to take home after the class. In this class you will learn how to start programming in the Arduino environment including interacting with the inputs and outputs of the Arduino.

You should bring: a laptop with the Arduino environment downloaded installed. 

Please contact us (info@workshop88.com) if you have any questions.

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

You can order Arduino systems from several places, including Adafruit and Sparkfun. Both companies have lots of tutorials and howtos to get you started with Arduinos. If you choose the tuition + materials option, we will have an arduino and assortment of electronics components for you to take home after the class.

You should bring: a laptop with the Arduino environment installed.

Please contact us (info@workshop88.com) if you have any questions.

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

You can order Arduino systems from several places, including Adafruit and Sparkfun. Both companies have lots of tutorials and howtos to get you started with Arduinos. If you choose the tuition + materials option, we will have an arduino and assortment of electronics components for you to take home after the class.

If you already have an arduino, you have all the materials you’ll need for this class.  Otherwise, you can order a kit and we’ll have it for you when you come to the class.

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

You can order Arduino systems from several places, including Adafruit and Sparkfun. Both companies have lots of tutorials and howtos to get you started with Arduinos. If you choose the tuition + materials option, we will have an arduino and assortment of electronics components for you to take home after the class.

In Arduino 201, we’ll be using the Processing framework and the Firmata library for the Arduino to interact with the Arduino from a graphical user interface.

This class will build on the Darkness Detector circuit we built in Arduino 101, adding calibration knobs for high and low, and outputting the resulting data to a graph using Processing.

Students should be familiar with the concepts and circuits taught in Arduino 101, specifically reading analog inputs and the voltage divider circuit used in the Darkness Detector.

Knowledge of Processing is not required.

What to Bring

• A laptop (we have a few spares, let us know if you need to reserve one)
• Your arduino kit (or order one with the class)

Materials

All classes in the Arduino Track require the Arduino Kit (external link to Adafruit).

Buy it now ($15 off with tuition) and reuse it for the rest of the classes!

We’ll be holding a second hackathon 2:00pm-9:00pm Saturday February 6th. A couple projects we’ll be working on are our big near space balloon event and some beer brewing and bottling. As always bring your projects, bring your Arduinos, and bring your excitement!

We’ll be holding it at Jay’s house again, if you’re interested in attending and did not come last time, please contact info@workshop88.com for the address.

Let us know if you’re coming and discuss potential projects on the forum post.

As part of our first public meeting this Monday, we handed out a bunch of :CueCats to everyone who attended, along with a challenge: tinker with them, see if you can get them to do something fun, and share it with everybody at the next meeting.

I’m planning on using mine to build a handheld barcode scanner based on an Arduino and the touch screen from a Nintendo DS that stopped working a while back.  It may be a bit ambitious, so I’ll probably need help along the way.  I thought it might be helpful for others to see what I’m doing in case they get stuck in their own projects.  The Arduino is in the mail, but while I wait on that, here’s the progress so far.

The devices we passed out were model #68-1965-A, rev. 06A00.  These are all PS/2 models, so there’s a bit more of a challenge involved if you don’t have a computer with a PS/2 port and a non-USB keyboard.

Upon removing the case (4 small Phillips screws in the base and 4 even smaller ones on the PCB), I discovered that these must have been late-model 06A00′s, since rather than the chip shown in most pictures online, there was a blob of epoxy more commonly seen on the 07A00 series devices.

The back of the board has a connector for the PS/2 plug, but unfortunately it isn’t removable, so for the moment, I left it alone. The variable resistor apparently adjusts the scanning speed, but I haven’t tried changing the setting yet.

After a bit of searching online, I found that even thought the IC in the center of the board may have changed, most of the other circuitry was the same as the old model, so disabling the serial number for this device was as simple as cutting a single trace so that one of the pins of the IC just below the U6 label on the board floats.  I just used a utility knife, it doesn’t really take much.

This is the output from the scanner, both before and after cutting the trace above.  I ran it through a simple perl decoder script because I haven’t wired up the device to do the decoding yet.  As you can see, after cutting the trace the serial number no longer appears in the output.

The next step for me is to get the device to decode the barcode string before it outputs it to the PS/2 line.  cexx.org indicates that by this can be accomplished by tying R6 high from any of the +5V lines on the board, so I’ll give that a shot.  (Thanks to Kevin R for pointing that out!)

Hopefully my Arduino will arrived in the next few days and I can start moving forward with the next stage of the project!