Too few hours in the day //Jafoca.com

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

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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So after receiving my arduino last week from Seeed studio, I have been itching to give it a roll.  Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, I stupidly forgot to pick up a breadboard so I have been pretty limited to what I can do.  That has not stopped me from hooking up a single LED and my giant mushroom button!  That is the standard 2nd or 3rd development tutorial step.

I then set to work creating a toggle’d light switch with the button.  One press turns it on, next press turns it off kind of thing.  The problem is that you experience a phenomena called bouncing where the light may not do exactly what you want it to do when you activate the switch.  I thought I could figure out how to de-bounce the input from the switch myself, however it was a bit more of a pain that I thought it might be.

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