w00t, I just received my board!

I'll start playing around with it later this week, I hope.


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The item () will leave Hong Kong for its destination on 29-Jan-2010.

This is taking foreverrrrr.

I'm interested in this although sadly my skills with electronics borders on lethal. Last time I tried to solder the gas soldering iron exploded and burnt my hand and set fire to the carpet in my old office much to the joy and amusement of those around. I must admit I found it amusing myself and was actually thankful for the lack of hair on my head as it presented a fire break.

Thats why I love my DC coupler! Left it on for 4 hours doing a 2 hr long exposure in <20 degree weather, and it didnt care

Its here!!!

I've been too busy, its driving me nuts! I didnt get to even open the package till 9pm. I can't find my breadboard either. It boots up, that's about all I know. Now I'm at work.

I took a picture of everything I got, but I don't know how to pull files off my camera using a mac powerbook g4 running 10.4 server. Macs don't 'just work'. Windows pulls up a folder with files, the mac doesnt even know it was plugged in.

Looks to be like the weekend is a bust for all plans because of the snow. Soo..

One question - I got extra cables to connect the arduino to a breadboard, but if I put the wire in any of the holes (in the arduino) they are really loose and feel like they will lose connection. Do I need to solder in all the headers, or will just placing a wire in the hole work fine?

I just thought of another fun part for the camera controller.

Get a proximity sensor to take a picture when someone comes near. Slap on a ring flash, and mount it to the wall at a party. People would come up to it making faces and it keeps taking pics.

Originally Posted by jjswee

I've been too busy, its driving me nuts! I didnt get to even open the package till 9pm. I can't find my breadboard either. It boots up, that's about all I know. Now I'm at work.

I took a picture of everything I got, but I don't know how to pull files off my camera using a mac powerbook g4 running 10.4 server. Macs don't 'just work'. Windows pulls up a folder with files, the mac doesnt even know it was plugged in.

Looks to be like the weekend is a bust for all plans because of the snow. Soo..

One question - I got extra cables to connect the arduino to a breadboard, but if I put the wire in any of the holes (in the arduino) they are really loose and feel like they will lose connection. Do I need to solder in all the headers, or will just placing a wire in the hole work fine?

Pick up some thicker-gauge (smaller number) hookup wire, that should do it. I personally wouldn't want to solder anything directly to the Arduino, but ideally I'd go with soldering your cable to an SIP header and plugging that in instead:



Digi-Key - ED7264-ND (Manufacturer - 800-10-064-10-001000)

You can just pop off as many of those as you need, and they should be spaced at the same pitch as the socket in the board (so if you need four next to each other, just pop off a group of four). Solder the wire to the short end of the header, seal it up with heat shrink to protect the connection, and Bob's your uncle.


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The arduino came with these headers:



but they too are loose. They are built to be soldered in.

Update!

I decided to get my LCD hooked up over the weekend. I tried having the headers rest in the LCD holes and just putting on some pressure to create contact. Turns out, that doesn't work. Sunday I soldered up some headers to the LCD and thought I was good to go. Nothing lit up. After a while I found I didn't have the backlight hooked up to power. After that, I had it lighting up, but no words on the screen. (I was running the basic hello world liquidcrystal code). Finally at about 11pm sunday night I talked with some people on a chat room and found my problem.

The V0 pin on the LCD controls the contrast of the text and requires a 10k pot. I thought I could use some resistors instead of a pot. Boy was I wrong. The pot isnt there for resistance to V0 but for a voltage divider to ground. I plugged v0 directly into ground and the text magically appeared.

I played around with code for a little and wired up a push button switch. All I have so far is the button controlling a 'delay' variable and displaying that on the screen.

Next up: Adding more switches and writing some sort of operating system code where I can input the user to set delay times for the interval timer. I also want to hook up my WiShield and see if I can get the iphone to control a few led's or whatever.

Picture!



The lcd is displaying:
hello, world!
46 (seconds running)
delay: 5 (the delay variable is set to 5)
8 (the adjustable number where I can change the delay to)

This is too exciting.

Man, I really need to start work on this.


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Honestly, man... just order what you need from Digikey. It's waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay cheaper and you'll have it the next day.


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Yeah, I guess that is a bit of a bitch. Narrow it down by "in stock" and "RoHS" -- and I'd imagine you want the third category, "Transistor, Photovoltaic Output."


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Yay replies!

I already have Arduino 0018.

My brother gave me a bag of goodies, but all I used were some resistors so far. I have a photo-switch that I will hook up sometime.

I think I want to get the wireless shield working next, instead of expanding on the delay code. I did find a forum post saying how the MEGA is hard to get working with the WiShield.

so how much do these end up costing you guys?

1 x photo-electric switch (SEN115A2B) = $0.35
1 x Mini USB cable 150cm (ARD112C5B) = $2.00
1 x Breadborad jumper wire 70pcs pack (CAB110C4M) = $5.00
1 x LCD 20*4 Characters - White back light (LCD108B6B) = $16.50
1 x Mini Push Button Switch (20pcs pack) (SWT110B3B) = $2.00
1 x Seeeduino Mega fully Assembled (ARD121D2P) = $46.50

1 x Wishield 1.0 - $50.00

You can do this a lot cheaper than I did, but I decided to spend double on things like the lcd and arduino so I have more room to grow. You don't need the Wishield either. I would get some 100, 1k, 10k resistors though, for the switches. And some LEDs.

yeah, you know you can buy chinese knockoffs for ~$30 right?
I know half of this is the fun of putting it together, but still.

You can also put one of these together pretty cheap, too. There's no real need for a pre-assembled Arduino board, the Atmega MCU is only about $6.


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Originally Posted by jacobsen1

yeah, you know you can buy chinese knockoffs for ~$30 right?
I know half of this is the fun of putting it together, but still.

Yeah but I didn't only buy this for a camera trigger. I will be able to do whatever other projects I want. But honestly, its the building that makes it so much fun.

right, but you're still over $20 and that's w/o a housing or anything to actually hook it up to the camera (cable). Don't get me wrong, this looks like fun and I love DIY, but for me there has to be a cost savings or improvement over what I can get premade.

Cost savings come from making these in bulk. I suspect that the prices that jjswee is quoting are from Radio Smack, which is expensive (compared to Digikey or Newark, that is). That, however, isn't really the interest here.

It's improvement, really. You can pretty much make the thing do whatever you want, with as much fine-grained control as you like. I'd like to try to figure out how to interface the Arduino with the Camera via USB so that I can have some real control of exposure settings, not just having a fancy remote-shutter release.

Basically, look at it this way: what would your gripe(s) be with the $30 premade unit? I can fix that, with just a few lines of code.


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Originally Posted by Angelo

Basically, look at it this way: what would your gripe(s) be with the $30 premade unit? I can fix that, with just a few lines of code.

from what I've read, not much. Hell, my in camera timer does most of what I need.

Angelo - I bought my stuff from Seeeduino's own store, just a basic kit. You cant buy an Arduino from RadioShack.

Originally Posted by jacobsen1

from what I've read, not much. Hell, my in camera timer does most of what I need.

See chkltcow's reply. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to trip your shutter with sound, or motion, or light, or whatever?

Originally Posted by jjswee

Angelo - I bought my stuff from Seeeduino's own store, just a basic kit. You cant buy an Arduino from RadioShack.

Where do you think they get a) the parts to build your Arduino and b) the extra components that you ordered?

My point was just that you don't actually need the Arduino itself -- all an Arduino is, is an Atmega microcontroller and some interface bits (USB, power, headers, &cet.). You can easily just make your own breadboarded design (or even PCB, try www.expresspcb.com) with whatever you need and it'll cost you less. We used an Atmega8 for the robot I showed on page one of this thread, and we used a serial interface between the computer and the breadboard (no USB, just a small ribbon cable) to program it in C.

Arduinos just make it way easier to do that!


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You mean PCB design?

For custom shapes and functions, I guess. I'm just saying. Heck, if you're good enough with a soldering gun, you could just create a hardwired point-to-point unit and forego PCBs and breadboards.

Fact is that the Arduino team sells convenience and community. And it's a heck of a deal, IMO.


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Ben,

While this thread is dedicated to intervalometers and are being created with these "high" cost components, in reality the components they are using can be re-used in a mock up fashion to prototype different concepts. I've said it before, you can build these devices for way under $30, if you know what you're doing. It is nice to have a pre-assembled evaluation board for prototyping (setups people are using here). Just like you wouldn't use a Xilinx Spartan eval board in full up circuit card design, but you may plop that sucker on your desk, write some VHDL/Verilog and prototype your design before you finish your circuit card design and external circuitry.. same concept on a much lower end scale.

In the end, if you don't know what you're doing it's a great place to build off of, if you do but you like to prototype and debug your code with known good hardware (you could hook things up wrong too ya know) this is a nice to have just to remove extra variables from the debug equation.

Originally Posted by chkltcow

Yup. As I understand it, the Arduino was originally designed to open up the electronics hobby to artists and designers rather than just electrical engineers. I didn't know **** about electronics when I stumbled across this. I helped build a guitar distortion pedal back when I was in high school that promptly friend itself, got rebuilt, fried itself again, and got trashed. I knew a bit of the basics of what certain parts are, but I still can't tell you why you'd use a 100uF capacitor instead of a 10uF capacitor.... or what the hell a pulldown resistor, MOSFET, or Amp actually is or does. But still, within a day of getting it, I had built a basic intervalometer for doing actual work... and things like a binary counter to count from 0 to 255 just for fun That says something for the ease and convenience.

For sure! And that's why I think the Arduino project is sooooooooooooooo cool. I'm 100% behind them and their democratization of hobbyist electronics.


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Try newark or jameco.

I was able to find this http://www.jameco.com/webapp/wcs/sto...oductId=217525 3mm clear white LED on Jameco in about 2 mins.

There are certain things Digikey is great for, like buying in bulk when you have a parts list. It is not what I'd call user friendly when you're trying to find a part for your BOM. You'll end up finding some fantastic device only to realize the package is not hand-solderable or the minimum qty requirement is 15,000 units.

Hope that helps you, all this DIY stuff is making me itch to build some of my projects.. nice thing when you have modeling and simulation tools, all you gotta do is purchase the components :P

Update: I've been messing with the WiShield for the past week, and damn its confusing once you get away from 'hello world'. It really doesn't help when I am dyslexic and type in a WEP password wrong 4 times in a row. That was my entire night last night... one number being out of place.