More Arduinos

Over the last two weeks I have continued to play with the arduino platform and explore electrical circuit design. It has been amazing. I have so many projects in the works.

Shortly after my last post I ordered components to build my own arduino. As it is not an official Arduino board I’ll call it arduino compatable and refer to it as DIM (Did it myself).

I didn’t take pictures when the packages came in (lazy and spoilery of other projects). The beautiful thing is the cost of the components. You can build a board that is as functional as the Arduino Uno for about $15. Granted you can buy an Uno for $21 on amazon, but you lose out on the fun of building it yourself.

I ordered most of my parts through Mouser Electronics. I ended up buying the main chip from Sparkfun and paying $5 per chip to get ones with the bootloader on the board. If you can find a way to load the bootloader yourself you can buy the chip for $2 on Mouser.

I also bought a Uno R3 on amazon. The R3 has a removable chip so I develop on the Uno and then move the chip over to one of my DIM. Wait, he used plurals there. Yes. I bought components to build four DIM.

Here is a circit diagram I made for a DIM that (almost) mirrors the UNO. Also a picture of the completed board.

I followed this tutorial. It was great. I didn’t do the whole etch your own board part, but the parts list was amazing. When I got to the testing part of my first DIM I ran into some problems.

This tutorial from the Arduino website is very helpful as well. This has become my go to guide. When I couldn’t get my first DIM to work I built a second DIM on a breakout board like the tutorial shows. I couldn’t get that to work either. After that I ragequit and worked with a coworker the next Monday. Turns out the first tutorial guided me to choose the wrong capacitors. I switched out for some different ones and it works. I also swaped the capacitors on my first DIM and it worked too! I also sorted out some small design issues I had with the first DIM.

I also designed a custom pinout DIM for interfacing with my LED cube. Here are pictures.

The only issue I had with this board was I soldered the power LED in backwards. Oops. I choose to leave the reset button off of this board. I can’t reach it when the LED Cube shield is on the board.

On a side note I ordered this soldering iron yesterday. I’m looking forward to using it. I also picked up one of these guys. It should allow me to program the DIM’s without pulling the chip.