This Arduino nonsense is actually pretty neat. It’s a small electronics project board with a programmable chip and a pile of General Purpose I/O pins. You can use it to control or be controlled by pretty much anything. There’s tonnes of examples out there from the simple blinking an LED to the much more complex task of automating the watering and lighting of indoor grows. The best of it is this thing costs £5 – five pounds sterling, no shit!
Unless I’m horribly mistaken but £5 is also the cost of a lego style knife, fork and spoon set.
Don’t get me wrong these are pretty cool too but you can’t program it to electrocute your mate whenever he gets a quiz question wrong so why bother – get an Arduino instead 🙂
Lets take a look at ‘my first Arduino projects’ or at least ones I’ve managed to get working today…