Too few hours in the day //Jafoca.com

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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So as I mentioned before, my car has been having some problems.  It all started with a “Check Engine” light about 1500 miles before my warranty went out.

After going in and out of the shop 4 times for the problem, and subsequently leaking petrol all over the garage at my house, I was assured that “the problem was taken care of”.

Thankfully too, the Audi service manager, Mike at Delta Imports, said that they would stand behind my Audi even after the warranty is up, since it is admittedly buggy (lemon perhaps?).  I am very greatful for this, but I feel that this is what should be expected when buying a high end car from the beginning.

I was just hoping not to put his word to the test so soon.

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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