Tuesday May 13, 2008 Making Things Talk - Hello Worlds
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I've been reading Making Things Talk that I bought at the Maker Faire ten days ago. As well as the book, the kit I purchased included an Arduino and various other electronic components that would be useful with said microcontroller platform. |
Chapter 1 of the book is a variety of Hello Worlds to make sure that everything is working okay. Thankfully all the source code examples used in the book are available for download.
The first thing to get working is Processing:
"Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions."
It's based on Java and was easy to setup and run the two sample programs. It looks like a fascinating language. I could see myself tinkering with it quite a bit.
I initially started trying to do all this on my Ubuntu Hardy system, but one of the other things that had to be setup is the Arduino Development environment and that's got a problem with Ubuntu Hardy by default:
"You need to uninstall braille support if you want to use /dev/ttyUSB0: just remove the package brltty in Adept, and the USB port will be available for communication with Arduino."
As I need Brltty for my day job, that was no good, so I just swapped over to using my Mac laptop and got the Arduino software (and Processing) working there. I plugged the Arduino into one of the USB ports, added a red led between pin 13 and ground, uploaded a small example program to flash it every second. That all worked fine.
The other main Hello World in this chapter was to setup a machine as an Apache server and enable PHP. That was about two minutes work (including downloading and installing the software) using Hack #96 in the Ubuntu Hacks book.
Before I go on to the first real project in the book, I'm going to build the Proto Shield that also came in the Maker Faire kit. Ladyada has some really nice instructions that should make this easy. Let's hope I haven't forgotten all my soldering skills.
More when I get into doing really interesting Arduino stuff.
( May 13 2008, 07:44:23 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [2]
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This is the Diecimila, I assume?
Posted by Alex Hixon on May 13, 2008 at 10:50 PM PDT #
Hi Alex. Yes. Looks like you've got one and just
started using it too.
Posted by Rich Burridge on May 14, 2008 at 07:24 AM PDT #