arduino.cc posted:

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.
Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators. The microcontroller on the board is programmed using the Arduino programming language (based on Wiring) and the Arduino development environment (based on Processing). Arduino projects can be stand-alone or they can communicate with software running on a computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP).

huhu posted:

Just kidding, have my first two questions.

Here is the first thing I'm working on:
http://www.oomlout.com/oom.php/products/ardx/circ-01

What is the purpose of the resistor in the setup? I see that it goes Pin 13 -> LED -> Resistor -> Ground.

Also, there is a wire between 5V on the Arduino board and the + on the bread board. However, there is nothing else connected to the + and with or without this wire the light still works. What is the function of this?

huhu posted:

Just kidding, have my first two questions.

Here is the first thing I'm working on:
http://www.oomlout.com/oom.php/products/ardx/circ-01

What is the purpose of the resistor in the setup? I see that it goes Pin 13 -> LED -> Resistor -> Ground.

huhu posted:

Also, there is a wire between 5V on the Arduino board and the + on the bread board. However, there is nothing else connected to the + and with or without this wire the light still works. What is the function of this?

Martytoof posted:

Is anyone familiar with Fritzing?

I'm trying to fab up a PCB with an ADXL325 accelerometer, only I have the accelerometer as a base chip, not a pre-supplied breakout board.

I'm trying to maybe just do a generic part, but the ADXL325 is a LFCSP-16 chip which I can't find a "generic" PCB component for.

I'm aware that I might have to create one myself, but I'm hoping someone knows where I can find one before I have to learn to create custom ICs.

Martytoof posted:

Are there any viable alternatives for Fritzing that won't cost an arm or a les and will run ether under OSX or Linux? Honestly after playing with Fritzing I'm hitting a bunch of walls. It's no big deal or anything.. I bought e accelerometer chips for next to nothing so if I have to break down and buy the breakout bard version I will probably live to fight another day.

Martytoof posted:

Awesome, thank you

Jonny 290 posted:

New board!

http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardDue



Lookit all that friggin' I/O.

Cortex M3 at 84 MHz, native USB, 54 GPIO pins, 12 analog ins and 2 12-bit DAC outs!


Music makers, this is your fuckin' jam.
Looks like it's going to go for $50ish.

Arduino 1.5 will support compiling to it, and has some other nice usability bumps.

ANIME AKBAR posted:

It's nice to see an ARM-duino variant which actually has the Arduino brand to back it up now. Hopefully they give decent support for the DMA and USB, unlike the maple.

JesusDoesVegas posted:

For anyone in the same boat as me trying to follow Delta-wye's advice, I found a pretty good YouTube series that shows the process of coding various increasingly complicated projects. Search sciguy14 on YouTube (I'd post a link but I'm on my tablet).

It won't teach you to be self sufficient but it will provide insight for why code and circuits are set up the way they are, which is perhaps vital for those of us on this intro "script-kiddie" level.

Delta-Wye posted:

Yeah, there is also the electronics aspect which is a whole other beast (and can be somewhat avoided when working in Processing). What kind of projects does the youtube channel walk you through?

Jonny 290 posted:

Cortex M3 at 84 MHz, native USB, 54 GPIO pins, 12 analog ins and 2 12-bit DAC outs!

Music makers, this is your fuckin' jam.

Pompous Rhombus posted:

Came in here hoping there'd be a dedicated thread for Arduino's!

I've been kind of passively following Arduino news for a while (have only the most basic knowledge of programming/soldering, but interested in learning a bit), and am interested in finally trying something out. It really appeals to my imaginative/creative side, and it seems like there's a lot of community support and information out there to help me on my way.

One project I think might be kinda neat is being able to control my apartment's lights/climate control through the internet, as both have remotes (). I see that people have written sketches that will read/record the IR protocols from a remote, I assume once you've got those it's pretty straightforward to output them through an IR transmitter?

Base Emitter posted:

Just what I want, and just what I want it for.

I haven't used Arduino or Processing before, can you program this board in C++ easily enough? I've done some stuff with mbed boards, which are really straightforward to program (they just look like flash drives to your PC), and I'd prefer to use a familiar language than learn another niche language...

Pompous Rhombus posted:

Repostin' this cuz I was hoping for an answer.

Base Emitter posted:

Just what I want, and just what I want it for.

I haven't used Arduino or Processing before, can you program this board in C++ easily enough? I've done some stuff with mbed boards, which are really straightforward to program (they just look like flash drives to your PC), and I'd prefer to use a familiar language than learn another niche language...

babyeatingpsychopath posted:

I went to Radio Shack, picked up an Arduino Uno, then took a dremel to an old Dreamcast Racing wheel, uploaded some stuff from this page.

$30 rudder pedals with individual toe brakes for my flight sim. $60 if my time is worth $20/hr.

As to the other stuff, I normally program PICs and MSP430s, and most of my stuff is in assembler, so program size and memory has never, ever, ever been a problem. Debugging and time to product, however, could be faster. This Arduino stuff is kinda backwards; throw lots of code at a small problem and let the huge memory cope with the bloat, overhead, and unused stuff, and just not worry because It Works.

JesusDoesVegas posted:

JesusDoesVegas posted:

It's got native USB compatibility instead of USB to serial like the older models had, so it can plug and play as any peripheral depending on what the program says.

JesusDoesVegas posted:

Clearly you've got quite a bit more experience with coding and microcontrollers than I do... but it seems as though your statement about the arduino's huge memory conflicts with my experience in my previous post.

JesusDoesVegas posted:

I found that when my code got too long it just didn't work. After commenting off large chunks (but being careful to not change any actual behavior) it worked again. This led me to believe I had a memory issue. The specific code was in the area prior to setup where I declare about 128 variables (for specific note values) and 13 maps for analog input (one for each major key, and a smooth logarithmic map for the individual grains).

JesusDoesVegas posted:

The 128 variables were amended down to 60, and each scale map was cut to a 4 octave range in order to both save space and enhance playability (too many octaves made finding a specific note too difficult. I went a little overboard). It works now, but I want to add functionality for an LCD screen, and I'd like to add other scale maps (augmented and diminished) so I know I'll need to find a better solution before adding MORE code.

JesusDoesVegas posted:

I could save space by getting rid of the variable declarations for each note and actually plugging in the note value in the map, but gently caress that would take forever and probably lead to me messing something up (though I'm not ruling this out if necessary). I've seen other people's code split up across multiple files (see Dr. Bleep's ATMEGA328 based Nebulophone - CODE ). I don't know why he does that but I assumed perhaps it was either to organize the sections of functionality or save space, or both.

I know this post is getting really long, but I figure I'll just get all of my questions out now... With the LCD screen I want to write the note value of the note currently playing. On a guitar or a piano its easy to tell what note you're playing, but on this thing I'm using a softpot as my play surface and the note maps change. Is there a way to write the variable NAME, not the variable VALUE to the LCD? If not the only option I can see is writing a giant 0 - 59 option case function, which I doubt is very efficient (though I could save space by nuking those 60 variable declarations).

JesusDoesVegas posted:

Last question - do comments take up space at all? I know they aren't executed, but should I delete them out completely to save space, or are they just not uploaded at all?

JesusDoesVegas posted:

EDIT - If what I'm trying to do won't work with one board, I also considered adding another unit, one for synthesis and one for output. I'd prefer not to go that route however as it seems sloppy, and power, cost, and real estate would be come an issue.

phospete posted:

The biggest project I've used them for was to make a device that would prime the hot water line between my master bathroom (which is on the opposite side of my house as the hot water heater) by pumping water from the hot water side to the cold water side, instead of just wasting water down the drain for two solid minutes every time I wanted to take a shower.

JesusDoesVegas posted:

Things like that are exactly what arduino is for... Guy has a problem, guy wants to turn that problem into a project, guy fixes issue and feels accomplished every time he uses his fix.

Tell me you've done something about the hanging plugs in that last pic.

JesusDoesVegas posted:

Delta-Wye is my new favorite poster. The array suggestion won't work for me since setting the variables was really just making things easier on me. Instead of writing out maps with strings of meaningless (to me) numbers, I could just write out the notes. About 15 minutes with find and replace, and some careful copy and pasting gets rid of the need to declare the variables, so I just bit the bullet and commented them out.

As an experiment I added 24 more scale maps (just repeated major scales but named them for diminished and pentatonic scales since that's what they will be in the future) and it only handles 32 total. That's 1 logarithmic chromatic scale for the grain pitch pots, 12 major, 12 diminished, and 7 pentatonic. Those last 5 won't fit.

Delta (or anyone else) do you know of a more concise way to map these scales? Essentially the Auduino assigns a pot to play the instrument (I'm using a softpot for playability). That pot's analog input is mapped to frequencies dictated by the currently selected scale. Here's example of one map:

code:

// Key of C ........C D E F G A B 
uint16_t majorC [29] = {   
    274, 308, 346, 366, 411, 461, 518, 
    549, 616, 691, 732, 822, 923, 1036, 
    1097, 1232, 1383, 1465, 1644, 1845, 2071, 
    2195, 2463, 2765, 2930, 3288, 3691, 4143, 4389
       }; 

uint16_t mapMajorC(uint16_t input) { 
  uint8_t value = (1023-input) / (1024/29); 
  return (majorC[value]); 

I didn't originally write this program, I'm just modifying it, but I think I understand what it's doing. The first uint16_t is declaring the map variable with 29 values (those brackets were actually empty in the original code), and then declaring what the values are. Next it tells the program to turn the analog signal with a 0 to 1023 range into 29 possibilities (incrementing the total number of possibilities by 1 to make the map a percentage of the full pot's range).

I don't think this can be done with an array, and I'm sure it takes up quite a bit of memory for each one. Could I somehow change the way I'm declaring these so they are stored in the relatively plentiful flash memory instead?

If it helps, right now when I compile the sketch it tells me "Binary sketch size: 5,168 bytes (of a 32,256 byte maximum)" which I'm assuming is talking about flash.

quote:

If it helps, right now when I compile the sketch it tells me "Binary sketch size: 5,168 bytes (of a 32,256 byte maximum)" which I'm assuming is talking about flash.