Arduino is most active and successful open hardware project. One of major reason is simple hardware and simple language to program with flexible and easy-to-use modules.
Person having basic electronics knowledge can start with Arduino in an hour or so. Furthermore, Availability and price of Arduino boards is major advantage. Plenty of country has local vendor (including some having multiple vendors.) The add-on card such as blue tooth shield or Wi-Fi shield makes it more usable. Arduino forum and wiki are best place to get any help related to Arduino.
Based on exact purpose of project, you can select best Arduino hardware. Ethernet, Xbee and motor shield can be quite useful for experiment. Typical Arduino core has ATmega series chip-set.
Posts Tagged ‘Bluetooth’
Arduino
December 29th, 2010openPICUS : Wireless Controller
April 9th, 2010openPICUS board is very simple board with great idea, connect sensor/actuator on one end & wireless modules on other end of PIC micro controller.
One of the design will have WiFi, while other will have Bluetooth as wireless module on openPICUS board. To make things simple to implement, openPICUS team have used 2 layer circuit design.
Board contains Microchip PIC24F 16 bit chip set for processing. Sensors such as temperature, accelerometer, flow detector can be interfaced to PIC. The readings of firmware can be done using wireless link. The firmware should directly download from serial port.
PIC24F has I2C & SPI interface, which can be used to for LCD display. PIC24F has 4 Analog Inputs with 10 bit A/D, 5 Digital Inputs (3 can be used as Interrupt) & 5 Digital Outputs (3 can be used for PWM) which is fair set of IO to interface desired sensors & actuators.
Pros:
- Simple design with good IO capability
- Wireless support
