[Liverpool] Links from my Arduino talk

[Adrian McEwen]

I hope the talk wasn't too boring last night.  The session in the pub 
was definitely lively enough to make up for it ;-)

I thought it might be useful just to share a few links to some of the 
stuff I was talking about, in case anyone wants to have a play 
themselves.  And if you do, then you should come along to Howduino 
<http://www.howduino.com> the hackday I'm organising at FACT on Saturday 
23rd May.

<http://arduino.cc> is the main website for all things Arduino, you can 
download the software from there, learn how to program Arduinos and even 
download the PCB layout if you want to build your own board.

However, it's easier to buy a board that's ready made, and they're only 
20 quid.  I'd usually recommend getting one of the Tinker.it beginner 
kits - <http://tinkerit.myshopify.com/products/beginners-kit> - but 
they're currently having problems sourcing the breadboards and jumper 
wires for them, so an alternative solution would be to just buy an 
Arduino Duemilanove board from Tinker.it 
<http://tinkerit.myshopify.com/products/arduino> and then nip to Maplin 
to buy some electronics bits or get something like this starter kit - 
<http://bitsbox.co.uk/select.html#starter_kit>

My slides from the talk are available at 
<http://www.mcqn.net/mcfilter/archives/computers/barcamp_liverpool_getting_started_with_arduino_how_to_build_a_twittermonitoring_alertuino.html>

And the code that I used for my Twitter monitor is available at 
<http://code.google.com/p/mcqn/source/browse/#svn/trunk/Alertuino>

Finally, if you want to see the evolution of the Twitter monitor - with 
an Ethernet shield added and no dependency on a computer - there's a 
clip of Bubblino 1m54s into the video at 
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7961760.stm>.  And I'll be 
releasing the code for Bubblino some point in the next few days.

Cheers,

Adrian.