Too few hours in the day //Jafoca.com

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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