The Arduino thread

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Lord Nemesis

Lord Nemesis

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Making this generic thread for all Arduino discussion since I guess there are at least a few people on the forum who are into Arduino and I am myself interested.

Anyway I am starting of by posting some of the decent sites I found for Arduino/Robotics related stuff and in general for electronic components

Simple Labs | Simplifying Technology

Got my Arduino UNO from this site. They have a very small collection of components. prices are alright, Prices are not the best, but not the worst either. Response time was pretty fast, they shipped out my Arduino and few other misc stuff within 12 hours of my placing the order and they reached me by next day. Packing for done decently.

New Products : rhydoLABZ India , Your Source for Robotics & Embedded System

This is again a good site. Stuff was shipped out within less than 24 hours after ordering. I had ordered a bunch of stuff from them and every thing was individually sealed and meticulously labeled (printed labels) and then put in a cardboard box with appropriate protection. Prices are again not the best, but not the worst either.

Home page

Again a nice online store. Decent collection of motors and other other components. They also have a bunch of mechanical accessories like gears, wheels etc.

:+: [url]www.onlineTPS.com - Electronics and Robotics Components Shop - India, Components at your Doorstep - Satisfaction Guaranteed[/url]

Nice place to get our components. In fact this is the only place where I found stuff like resistors, condensers and transistors for a moderately fair prices. No other store even listed stuff like resistors. I ordered a bunch of spare components and they shipped it within a couple of days. I am yet to get it, but the response time at least is decent enough. They have a huge collection of low cost components and they also sell assorted collections of resistors, condensers, transistors and diodes which might be handy for hobbyists.

Robokits India, Easy to Use, Versatile Robotics Kits...

Haven't ordered from this site. They seem to over price everything. Shipping cost is too high and there are additional charge for credit card payment.

RC Electronics & more, thehobbyshop.in

Haven't ordered anything from them, this is primarily a RC Hobbyist shop, but I guess they have a bunch of servo's and other stuff that may come in handy for any Arduino hobbyists also.



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Now for a question? What kind of batteries are you guy's using to power Arduino and components like Sensors and Motors? I don't want to go for LiPo batteries right now. want to stick with a battery pack made out of AA NiMh or PP3 (9v) rechargeable battries.
 
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check out nex-robotics.com and onlinetps.com too

for discrete components local stores are best ,
 
RGB LED for 31.5! Great news for us modders.

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Damn, OOS. But the InduinoX looks nice. There is one more site, shall be posting it.

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IDA Systems - Home for beagle boards
 
Vidy said:
are you doing any projects right now with arduino??

How good is your coding ??
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Haven't done much with the Arduino yet, just very basic stuff. I want to get a battery before I try running the servo's. Don't want to endanger my 1.5Lac PC by trying to power servo's and other stuff through USB.

As far as programming is concerned, learning Arduino programming is no big deal as I already have a very strong programming base and I have programmed in a bunch of languages with little prior exposure.
 
Lord Nemesis said:
Haven't done much with the Arduino yet, just very basic stuff. I want to get a battery before I try running the servo's. Don't want to endanger my 1.5Lac PC by trying to power servo's and other stuff through USB.

As far as programming is concerned, learning Arduino programming is no big deal as I already have a very strong programming base and I have programmed in a bunch of languages with little prior exposure.
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Yes, but as long as we rely on available libraries you will not see any problem..

Once we are writing from scratch,we need to know care about interrupts,timers,registers,flags,instruction set etc

As you have strong programming that wont be an issue ,

Share us if your doing any project, right now i'm missing the inspiration.. getting lazy,

and regarding batteries get LIPO packs with charger ,they are costly but saves a lot in the long run.. they are

lighter than the Lead-acid batteries this helps a lot in reducing weight if you are building a bot ,
 
I got interested in the arduino and embedded systems lately. figured out that there are few good alternatives, especially for indians.
The kits in question are the "Launchpad" series from Texas Instruments. The best thing about these kits is that you can order directly from the TI's website and they dont charge for shipping and they ship through fedex priority:
MSP 430: https://estore.ti.com/Product3.aspx?ProductId=2031 at $4.30
Stellaris Launchpad https://estore.ti.com/Stellaris-LaunchPad.aspx at $12.99 shipping included. ordered one but still they are pre orders will get min late in nov.

Stellaris is a ARM cortex M4F running at 80MHz ==> way more powerful than arduino.

You can also order exotic pic micro controller samples for free from microchipdirect. they charge $7.5 as processing fee. usually microchip requires you to register using company email id. I ordered one mc and got delivered it in 2weeks via dtdc in great packing. :)
On the other hand TI ships their samples at no cost at all, they ship through fedex priority and I got my msp430 mc along with few other components via fedex in flat 3 days in an awesome never seen before packing. :)

Hope you will find this info useful. thanks for reading.

Please share your experiences so that it could be helpful for other readers.
 
As Arduino is open source, anybody is free to build it sell it, only thing is they cant use is name 'Arduino'. You get such boards for ~500Rs on ebay.in. And yes, components that are included in kit are cheap. Just get them from electronics shop.

I'd like to say that, even though original Arduino board is costly, it's worth getting as a development board. Quality of the board is excellent, you get some phree stickers and message justifying why it's costly compared to it's counterparts.
 
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Guys, I got interested in these kits DIY Ardiono, Pi etc, and read about project for a week and then lost interest, if you guys are planning on something do share, maybe if we create a group and work on it, we can work through it. Members who have already completed projects do share your experience. @avi @booo
 
^ sure why not :) I have experience with Pi. Also built simple home automation stuff with relays. But a beginner in Arduino.
 
If one needs all those extra parts, it might be fine. Else, one can just get uno for ~$4 off ebay. Those work pretty fine to test things out.
 
avi said:
^ sure why not :) I have experience with Pi. Also built simple home automation stuff with relays. But a beginner in Arduino.
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That is what I also wanted to start with, can you share your experience and hardware used? I am sure you have seen mysensors.org.
 
Jasku said:
Guys, I got interested in these kits DIY Ardiono, Pi etc, and read about project for a week and then lost interest, if you guys are planning on something do share, maybe if we create a group and work on it, we can work through it. Members who have already completed projects do share your experience. @avi @booo
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avi said:
^ sure why not :) I have experience with Pi. Also built simple home automation stuff with relays. But a beginner in Arduino.
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I did some stuff with motors and omni directional wheels along with my cousin. but thats few years back. We did stuff like creating custom pcbs using eagle and acids, a small magnetic stirrer with pwm, computer fan and 555 for our pcb creation. used to have a lot of stuff with me back then.
w.r.t pi, we did some stuff too. linux kernel is pretty much what I do on a day to day basis. so if you want help I can contribute over github.

btw, I am thinking of doing somethings with rfid patches and bluetooth and other sensors. but I wont be starting it until late this year.

And a rather interesting and probably patent worthy idea but requires a lot of mathematics. (I am kinda guy with good scores at school but left it in favor of computers early in my life) but I wont start until late this year on this one too.

btw, another way to cheaply source some kickass products is by signing up and requesting samples. many companies send free samples with free shipping all over the world for enthusiasts. I got few freebies from TI and other semiconductor industries just for the kicks of it.
http://www.ti.com/lsds/ti/analog/sensors/overview.page
 
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avi said:
^ yup, but I haven't done anything related to Arduino (other than making couple of LEDs blink :p)

I did something like this: http://www.projects.privateeyepi.com/home/on-off-project (though I used Pyhon)
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It looks doable, I am looking for something that will add a practical solution to home automation as well without tampering the wiring.

booo said:
I did some stuff with motors and omni directional wheels along with my cousin. but thats few years back. We did stuff like creating custom pcbs using eagle and acids, a small magnetic stirrer with pwm, computer fan and 555 for our pcb creation. used to have a lot of stuff with me back then.
w.r.t pi, we did some stuff too. linux kernel is pretty much what I do on a day to day basis. so if you want help I can contribute over github.

btw, I am thinking of doing somethings with rfid patches and bluetooth and other sensors. but I wont be starting it until late this year.

btw, another way to cheaply source some kickass products is by signing up and requesting samples. many companies send free samples with free shipping all over the world for enthusiasts. I got few freebies from TI and other semiconductor industries just for the kicks of it.
http://www.ti.com/lsds/ti/analog/sensors/overview.page
Click to expand...

Okay you are a pro, looks like I will have to get my self acquainted with these boards, create something end to end to be comfortable with the whole experience, any pointers to a decent starting project?

I will definitely reach out to both of you incase of questions, but as stated above please point me in the right direction and what hardware should I get to start with?

I really like the TI sampler stuff, TFS.
 
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