Date: 01 Jun 08
Arduino workshop roundup
I'm just on the train back from the two day Arduino Wireless Workshop run by tinker.it. It was a terrific two days with lots of hands-on wireless hacking. We convered using the Bluetooth Arduino board and the XBee Arduino Shields allowing us to create wireless sensor mesh networks.
I concentrated on getting a wireless Bluetooth scanner working with my partner in crime, Camille. The Bluetooth board is a tricky one to interact with as it requires programming via Bluetooth which is notorious for interoperability problems. We resorted to programming it using an avr programmer which made it a snap to work with. Massimo helped us out with some software to run the scanner and we created a breadboard prototype :
Camille then showed his soldering skills and we moved the breadboard prototype onto an Arduino Shield which left us with a (semi) portable unit:
This is the fully portable version sitting in it's box :
There's also some shaky iPhone videos of it in action, you can see the names of Bluetooth devices flashing up on the LCD here (mp4) and here (mp4).
I'll be doing some more with this in the near future and it will be lurking somewhere in the office in a slightly different form, so keep an eye out if you come to visit !
Looks cool. You must be the fifth or sixth person I know to have taken up playing with Arduinos. There certainly seems to be a momentum there!