Green Light
Just got a new toy, a small Arduino board called a Nano costing well under a tenner from the usual Hong Kong suspects via Amazon. It's about the size of a USB thumb drive with a ATmega328 CPU on board giving 32KB of program flash memory, 2KB of static RAM and 1KB of data EEPROM and running at 16MHz. It's powered by an on-board USB connector which also allows access to download and run programs. There's a lot of free support, example programs, coding help and simple tools to produce and test code (known as "sketches", based generally on C with Arduino specific extensions and libraries).
It's sitting plugged into my desktop machine at the moment with a green LED pulsing gently, my first attempt to code for it. As with most beginning projects it involved some cut-n-paste programming from a code example, "Blink", the basic "Hello World" of Arduino programming. By the time I had finished with it the simple blink example was converted to pulse-width modulation on a rising and falling cycle; it still blinks but the brightness rises and falls gradually instead of being on/off.
I have plans for it, another little project I've had in the back of my mind for a few months. I'll steal other people's code to get it working then tweak it from there -- my intention is to build an editing foot-pedal USB device that emulates a specific keyboard operation; press down to emit CTRL-C (copy) and release to emit CTRL-V (paste). Hopefully it shouldn't be too difficult.
It's sitting plugged into my desktop machine at the moment with a green LED pulsing gently, my first attempt to code for it. As with most beginning projects it involved some cut-n-paste programming from a code example, "Blink", the basic "Hello World" of Arduino programming. By the time I had finished with it the simple blink example was converted to pulse-width modulation on a rising and falling cycle; it still blinks but the brightness rises and falls gradually instead of being on/off.
I have plans for it, another little project I've had in the back of my mind for a few months. I'll steal other people's code to get it working then tweak it from there -- my intention is to build an editing foot-pedal USB device that emulates a specific keyboard operation; press down to emit CTRL-C (copy) and release to emit CTRL-V (paste). Hopefully it shouldn't be too difficult.