Arduino Course @ Hackspace
My tendency to pick up the arduino microcontroller I'd bought to learn/play/do stuff with petered out a few weeks ago, so I thought I'd jumpstart things again by
a) Leaving all my relevant components and stuff at Hackspace, so that I would be able to work on them somewhere without other distractions, and
b) Sign up for one of their Arduino courses, to learn some of the more complicated stuff.
It was quite a fun day, despite the fact I'd already handled the first few experiments on my own; I messed around with slight variations on the stuff we were meant to be doing if I'd already done the basic ones, got through some more stuff I could have done on my own that didn't, and on the final exercises I certainly needed some help as debugging them was tricky to say the least.
The course is run over two days, which you can book together or seperately: the first day is for those who haven't done C programming before, and the second day is all electronics/Arduino. The exercises in the course are very well chosen, and each one introduces new concepts: you start off making a single LED blink, then quickly move on to making some interactive "traffic lights" with a pedestrian crossing, and onwards. There are 11 exercises in all and it really does nicely fill a day.
This morning I've been ordering some of the components I'd need to continue my Bloodbowl scoreboard. It also occurred to me that if I really want to continue, I should move right on at this stage to designing a circuitboard to hold most of the LEDs and some of the shift registers and displays: given the way the thing is likely to fit together, not everything needs to be (or should be) on a single board, and running 48 LEDs + some shift registers on a plugboard would be nearly as much trouble as making the real thing.
a) Leaving all my relevant components and stuff at Hackspace, so that I would be able to work on them somewhere without other distractions, and
b) Sign up for one of their Arduino courses, to learn some of the more complicated stuff.
It was quite a fun day, despite the fact I'd already handled the first few experiments on my own; I messed around with slight variations on the stuff we were meant to be doing if I'd already done the basic ones, got through some more stuff I could have done on my own that didn't, and on the final exercises I certainly needed some help as debugging them was tricky to say the least.
The course is run over two days, which you can book together or seperately: the first day is for those who haven't done C programming before, and the second day is all electronics/Arduino. The exercises in the course are very well chosen, and each one introduces new concepts: you start off making a single LED blink, then quickly move on to making some interactive "traffic lights" with a pedestrian crossing, and onwards. There are 11 exercises in all and it really does nicely fill a day.
This morning I've been ordering some of the components I'd need to continue my Bloodbowl scoreboard. It also occurred to me that if I really want to continue, I should move right on at this stage to designing a circuitboard to hold most of the LEDs and some of the shift registers and displays: given the way the thing is likely to fit together, not everything needs to be (or should be) on a single board, and running 48 LEDs + some shift registers on a plugboard would be nearly as much trouble as making the real thing.