A little while back I decided to get into electronics. I never really did much while I was at school, I was more into computers but about a year ago I bought myself some bits and a USBasp to program chips with but I think life caught up and I never found the time to learn about it properly. I still have the programmer somewhere but I never really learned how to use it.
So once again i’ve caught the bug, this time discovering Arduino. It’s an open source development board and IDE. It’s a little friendlier to use and there’s huge swathes of information about it on the internet. It’s more of a system around the chip than a way to program just the chip itself.
The IDE comes with quite a few example programs which are really handy for learning how to use it. I got my Arduino Duemilanove yesterday from a company based in Halifax called Oomlout who were recommended by a friend. They were really impressive and the kit arrived really quick. I went for the Arduino starter kit and a 16×2 LCD panel, they even threw in some extra LED’s for free 
Within a few minutes I was able to assemble a couple of circuits and modified some code I found for a cylon scanner. Take the arduino off the usb and plug in a battery instead and voila, so simple!
I’ll post the code up later, it’s stuck on my home computer.
So I have a couple of ideas and hopefully I’ll get time to make them a reality!
