Too few hours in the day //Jafoca.com

I think this will be my most… well thought out…. project yet!  Woohoo!

In addition to the stuff from NKCelectronics I got in the mail yesterday, I also received a box from Mouser. It seems like Mouser and DigiKey both have similar things, but there are always parts that you can find at one and not the other, as was the case with the digital multimeter I wanted – the Extech EX330.

So – why did I choose this DMM?  Well, unlike some other people I know, I do not have ‘all too easy’ access to $400 Fluke MM’s a work.  I wanted something good enough for most everything, but I didn’t really want to spend a LOT of money on it.

After consulting the EE buddy, Nick, he said that the one nice feature I should look for on a low-mid range MM would be frequency.  The EX-330 has that, great.

It also has a couple of nifty features that are a bit more unusual for a DMM in this price-range - temperature probe and a non-contact voltage detector (for high voltage, above 100v).  That was pretty cool.

And of course, a more qualatative measure took a bit of weight in the decision process – I thought this model of MM looked nicer than some of the others in this segment.

I was perhaps a bit wrong on that estimation – I thought the MM was red and black.  As is plainly shown in the photo at right, they opted for a much more orange and green scheme which is a bit off IMHO – ahh well, they aren’t racing stripes so the performance will not be affected.

Aside from the DMM, the other parts I got from Mouser are not too exciting – yet.  The list includes some higher power n-fets and a couple of ICs for driving high power LEDs.  Hopefully these will be in action soon.

I got some more gear in the mail yesterday. Below is an image of what my Arduino Ethernet Shield, from NKCelectronics looked like when I got it out of the packaging. I was totally willing to keep this, and repair it myself, but NKC stepped up to the plate and hit a customer service home run!

Read more to read my email corospondance with NKC that left me more than satisfied.

Bent arduino ethernet shield

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I made an order a while ago from DigiKey. I got some basic electronics prototyping stuff as well as a few sensors and LEDs t play around with. One of the more interesting things I picked up was a Ziglog ZDots PIR sensor (click to view datasheet).

Now this is not the usual PIR sensor that everybody in the arduino community usualy uses, that would be the parallax sensor from SparkFun.
This sensor, from what I saw, has a couple of distinct advantages over the SparkFun sensor:

1. It is less expensive than the SparkFun sensor ($2-3 woohhoooo!)
2. It operates in dual modes, hardware (digital) or serial mode – in which it accepts all kinds of advanced commands
3. I like to be different – the sparkfun sensor has been done before…

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My first order of stuff from DigiKey arrived today – yay!  Unfortunately it is so tightly packed inside the box that I am unable to dig in more here at work.  More on that later…

Yesterday i began exploring making the arduino communicate with the computer it is attached to.  Not having a breadboard left me with few options for what I could connect to the board, so I decided to work more on the software end of things.

I chose to work in Python at this time because I have been meaning to give it a try, and it is probably going to be pretty easy to web-enable python stuff using django.  Plus I am a little bit wary of using Processing for various reasons.

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