Can’t decide which Arduino Board is for you? Have a board you want others to know about? This Google Docs Spreadsheet compares some of the key attributes of various Arduino boards. Whether you are trying to decide which one to buy or just want to know the differences, this chart can help.

Open Source Hardware (OSH) means not only releasing devices, but all of the documentation associated with them. For some projects, this may include the actual CAD files used to produce the device. For example, the Arduino team produces not only schematics but the Eagle PCB CAD files for each of their boards. The great thing about such disclosure is that one can easily tweak the existing design for their own purposes. The downside is that nearly anyone can submit the exact same files to their own production house and have immediate clones.

Even when some people choose to do this, as have some eBay (and now Amazon) sellers, differences crop up from “real” boards and the clones (aka “fakes”). Click on the above photo for a Flickr-based “spot the differences” game!

The fix to these problems is simple: use pull-up resistors. Here’s how they can fix this problem and how you can use them with an Arduino board.

Detailed explanation…

Continue reading: Arduino Exercise: Pull-Ups

Even knowing that the name Arduino was rooted in Italian, I have often wondered what it meant.  David Kushner of IEEE Spectrum has a great write-up on the beginnings of the Arduino project.

Great read.  The most surprising thing to me is that over 250,000 official boards have sold since 2005.  That isn’t counting clones and stand alones.  Wow!

Assembled control board. The processor is an ATmega328, RTC is DS1307 RTC, and LED driver is a TLC5904. There is also a FT232RL on the back side for USB to Serial connection, however, it doesn’t appear to be working.Next I’ll need to turn on the RTC and make sure it can actually keep time.

On the Janurary 15, 2011 edition of Adafruit’s “Ask An Engineer” live video chat, I heard LadyAda mention something about “Arduino Amnesia.”  After investing the situation a little further, it turns out there are some Issues with the new Arduino UNO Smd edition.

A bug in the new bootloader can be triggered on power-cycle causing the SMD version of the board to not load the previously stored sketch.  The good news is there is already a fix for the bug.  Either return the board to your Official Distributor or use a ISP to program the new bootloader.

Issues (if I could even use that word) like this makes Open Source Hardware fun!

The millis() function is one of the most powerful functions of the Arduino platform. This function returns the number of milliseconds the current sketch has been running since the last reset. This may not seem to be highly useful until you consider it as a replacement for the delay() function. Now millis() itself cannot cause a delay, but you can use it create a virtual delay.

Continue reading: millis() Tutorial: Arduino Multitasking

Engineers at Yelp have put together an Arduino and iPad controlled Keg-o-rator.  By swiping their RFID they can track how much a person is drinking, collect statistics about how others enjoyed the beer (by rating it), and maintain a leader-board of the office.  Everything used in the project is based on off-the-self components.  My guess is that they are communicating between the iPad and Arduino over the iPod Dock’s i2c interface.  It looks like they are using the PodGizmo iPod Dock Conntector Breakout board available at Kinetka Systems.  Drink up!

This is a quick video demonstrating the LED Matrix Shield for the Arduino.  This Matrix is an 8×6 “Normal” matrix.  (It is not Chairleplexed.)  Blue LEDs were used to give it a brilliant hue and to provide another source of light in dimly lit apartment homes.  Only one row of the Matrix is lit up at one time.  This is done to save power and because the ATMega processor of the Arduino cannot source or sink more than 200mA of current.

More details on the Matrix, Software, and PCB hardware will be posted shortly.

The scrolling message can be any string of characters between ASCII 32 and 255. The font is a 8×6 font based on 5×7 characters.  Click below to see a picture of the Shield sitting on top of an Arduino.