Updated Arduino Goings On
It’s been a while since I last wrote anything so I thought I’d post an update on what’s been happening. Last weekend saw the first Unsheffield Unconfernce (based loosely around the Barcamp framework). This was held at The Showroom here in Sheffield from the 19th to 21st June and was a huge success. I can’t wait for the next one. I was fortunate enough to be able to give a presentation about the Arduino at this event and I think it went down very well. Since the weekend a new Arduino hackers club is forming in Sheffield. The web site address is http://shacknet.ning.com/ The idea behind this network is to be able to meet up with other Arduino hackers to discuss ideas, present projects that people are working on and also to help each other out. I’m very excited about this project and very happy to be involved with it.
This weekend I have finally gotten around to wiring up a Winstar WH2004A 20×4 LCD screen. I’ve had this screen for about 10 months now and only just gotten around to playing with it. Once the initial soldernig of a connector was done so that I could plug it in to a breadboard it was very easy to get this wired up and working with the LCD Tutorial from the Arduino.cc website and the 4bit LCD Liquid Crystal Library.
What I would like to do is link this to Twitter using the Tinker.it Ethernet Shield and have this directly display the last tweet received on my timeline. There are many instances of this happening on the web but the ones I have seen up to now all have an application running on a PC which sends down the messages to the Arduino using the Serial library. I would like to try and cut out the PC.
I’m now on the lookout for some open source software to allow me to document the electronics side of my projects so that I can then post all the details and sketchs for them on this site. If you have any recommendations for such software please leave me a note. It will be much appreciated.