For my senior design project at Wentworth, we are in need of a micro controller. I ordered the Arduino from SparkFun.com and it arrived yesterday. At the core is the ATMega328 which is plenty powerful for our application (which I’ll introduce in a later post).
The device has so many uses with its various shields and add ons such as ethernet and wifi. If you ever wanted to start getting into electronics, hardware or if you ever wanted to make something you’ve always wanted, the Arduino is a great start.
The ATMega328 contains the Arduino bootloader so we can flash it with the WIRE programming language (it’s pretty much C++, just dumbed down). It comes with plenty of examples so you can tweak existing code or piece together you own application.
I just got the device so I’m still tinkering with it. In the end we hope to have sensors, a speaker (with an audio amplifier we designed), some LED’s for safety and a few small peripherals to make it useful. Stay tuned for more info on my project, it’s still WIP so I can’t talk too much about it.
On the back is a neat picture of the country where this was built, Italy!
Arduino Specifications
| Microcontroller | ATmega168 |
| Operating Voltage | 5V |
| Input Voltage (recommended) | 7-12V |
| Input Voltage (limits) | 6-20V |
| Digital I/O Pins | 14 (of which 6 provide PWM output) |
| Analog Input Pins | 6 |
| DC Current per I/O Pin | 40 mA |
| DC Current for 3.3V Pin | 50 mA |
| Flash Memory | 16 KB (ATmega168) or 32 KB (ATmega328) of which 2 KB used by bootloader |
| SRAM | 1 KB (ATmega168) or 2 KB (ATmega328) |
| EEPROM | 512 bytes (ATmega168) or 1 KB (ATmega328) |
| Clock Speed | 16 MHz |
More Information
Top 40 Arduino Based Projects via HackNMod
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