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hobby electronics, soldering

I was trying to avoid soldering but looks like at some point it is mandatory to learn how to do it. Got myself a basic toolkit:

Soldering Tools

There are plenty of tutorials around. I enojyed Iyaz Akhtar’s KnowHow episode dedicated to soldering and EEVBlog’s tutorial. After spending some time around here’s the fruits of my efforts:

Soldered Circuit

Of course the components soldered on this board are meaningless and they don’t do anything. But it was a good practice.

I was surprised to find out that desoldering was an easy process. All you have to do is heat the iron, touch the solder and liquify it and then vacuum it using the desoldering pump.

Desoldered Resistor

Resources

hobby arduino, electronics, motion_sensor

Basically the fun with playing gadgets such as Arduino, Gadgeteer and others comes from sensors. Because they are how your system interacts with the real world. And writing code that acts upon some readings from the real world is fascinating!

So let’s get started with using the motion sensor. I have a very generic sensor from Parallax and fortunate enough to find an article that explains exactly what I needed: Using motion sensor with Arduino. Check out the resources section down below to access the original article. Unlike the LCD, it’s quite simple to connect the motion sensor to Arduino. The sample code lights the onboard LED when the motion sensor detects a motion. Check out the video for a short demo. When the sensor “senses” motion, it goes red and the LED starts blinking.

I think the next step would be to connect both LCD and motion sensor to display the alarms on the display. Hope I can make that project happen without too much delay.

Resources

hobby electronics, arduino

I’ve been looking for a good tutorial to connect the LCD screen to Arduino. There are a lot of tutorials everywhere but Interestingly most of them just show the final version with all the cables jumbled up. After a lot of looking around I finally found a simple, step-by-step tutorial with clear illustrations: http://www.codingcolor.com/microcontrollers/connecting-a-lcd-to-arduino/

This is a great tutorial and I recommend it to anyone who wants how to connect LCD to an Arduino.

Arduino with LCD

Resources