Wiring

So I've been tiring of the pure software thing for a long time, and upon visiting a friend in Atlanta who showed me his newly acquired Arudino PIC, a thousand doors were opened. I shopped around a bit and finally settled on the Wiring PIC. Its largely the same, except that it has 53 pins (for IO) instead of 11 and 128K of memory (for programs) instead of 16K (which is really only 14K because the bootloader is 2K).

SparkFun Electronics is my new favorite web site. First, they've got a huge selection of various electrical components at prices that I have to assume are fairly competitive - at the very least, this new hobby is substantially more affordable than any other hobby of mine in the past 15 years. I limit it to 15 years, because I put together a giant rubberband ball when I had a paper route and I could buy rubberbands by the POUND. They were cheap. Every hobby since then has been considerably more expensive. Additionally, SparkFun has an extensive collection of tutorials including a Beginning Embedded Electronics which has spared me much agony.

I ordered the Wiring board, a power adapter, an A-to-B USB cable (that's how one uploads programs to the Wiring board), breadboards, a digital multimeter, one wire thermometer, a couple coils of wire and a ton of miscellaneous electrical components (LEDs, resistors, capacitors, etc.). I also picked up a 20x4 character LCD, a 1GB microSD card and a FAT32 IC. Combine it all together, and I should be able to read data from various sensors (starting with the thermometer) and write that data to the Flash memory card.

After much agonizing, I finally got my first program successfully copying up to the Wiring board. The built-in LED now blinks S-O-S over and over. Not exactly my greatest accomplishment; its a humble beginning.

After I've got something basic working, I'm going to invest a few more dollars. I'm not sure what will be next, however. They have postage stamp size GPS units, so I could read and record the current location. Ultimately, if I still want to push the balloon project forward, I'll have to get the GPS working, and add in an AX.25 encoder and a 2 meter transmitter (so that I can receive the APRS information from the balloon remotely). Sadly, single component versions of those things don't seem to be for sale anywhere.

Of similar coolness, you can buy postage stamp size Cell phone chips. Quad-band support and they even have a built-in GPS. Just pop the SIM card out of your cell phone and place it in this chip and you're ready to go. Home-made LoJack? That'd be so cool.

SparkFun also has color LCD touchscreens, MP3 decoders (on a chip), servos, tons of sensors (temperature, humidity, compasses, accelerometers, infrared, RFID, etc.), very high density batteries and on and on. This'll keep me entertained for years.