All things Arduino
Had oodles of fun (sad I know) browsing the sparkfun.com and robotshop.ca online catalogues looking for components for the Auduino I’m planning to build… and getting a bit sidetracked with all sorts of interesting things…
Essentials include:
Audio Jack 3.5mm – £1.03
Audio Jack Breakout – £0.65
Rotary Potentiometer – Linear – £0.65
Potentiometer Knob – £0.65
although likely useful additional/alternatives components could be:
WiiChuck Adapter – £2.03
mentioned in my Modular Music Box research post and a ‘must-have’
Slide Potentiometer – 10K – £2.03
Slide Potentiometer Knob- £0.65
or alternatively the
DFRobot Slide Position Sensor – $8
Thumb Joystick – £2.71
Breakout Board for Thumb Joystick – £1.34
SPDT Mini Power Switch – £1.03
and some buttons
Button Pad 2×2 – LED Compatible – £2.02
Button Pad 2×2 Top Bezel – £2.71
Button Pad 2×2 – Breakout PCB – £3.40
or possibly keys
Seeedstudio Electronic Brick – 9 Button KeyPad Module $9.90
Seeedstudio Electronic Brick – 5 Button ADKey Module $5.50
While I’m ultimately planning to cut/etch my own board using Fritzing and the circuit board cutter at Fablab I’ll probably require a:
ProtoBoard – Rectangle Wired 3” – £3.09
and other components to help me stack boards and build things more easily such as the:
ScrewShield – £6.84
and components such as:
Screws 4-40 Thread – £0.65
Standoffs Metal Short – £1.34
Standoffs Metal Long – £2.03
I’ll also need a power source:
Polymer Lithium Ion Battery – 2000mAh – £11.65
“…very slim, extremely light weight batteries based on the new Polymer Lithium Ion chemistry.”
LiPoly Fast Charger – 5-12V Input – £13.71
or the more powerful triple stacked version
Polymer Lithium Ion Battery – 6Ah – £27.45
and a larger speaker:
Speaker – 0.5W 8Ohm – £1.34
Oh… and MIDI would be really useful:
MIDI Shield – £13.71
“The MIDI Shield board gives your Arduino access to the powerful MIDI communication protocol”
But then there’s a veritable smorgasbord of affordable additional sensor possibilities:
Light to Frequency Converter – TSL235R – £2.95
Light Intensity to Frequency IC – £4.09
TEMT6000 Breakout Board – £3.40
Ambient Light Sensor – TEMT6000 – £1.03
Hall Effect Sensor – £0.65
“Holding a magnet near the sensor will cause the output pin to toggle.”
Could be great for the syncing of the POV display – but equally several could be used to create a rotating magnetic sequencer?
ePIR – £8.21
“Zilog’s ePIR is a fully functional motion-detecting single-board computer (SBC).”
Color Light Sensor Evaluation Board – £13.71
and the musician in me thought it useful to have an LFO or two…
DS1077 Programmable Oscillator Breakout – 16.2kHz to 133MHz – £3.40
Break Away Headers – Straight- £1.72
“a dual-output, programmable, oscillator requiring no external components for operation.”
And as for extending the Arduino’s inputs and outputs – I think I’m going to run out fairly quickly 
– but there’s plenty of suggestions and solutions out there…
An Arduino: Learning article Serial to Parallel Shifting-Out with a 74HC595 – “At sometime or another you may run out of pins on your Arduino board and need to extend it with shift registers”… – such as:
-
- Shift Register 8-Bit – 74HC595 – £1.03
- “Simple shift register IC. Clock in data and latch it to free up IO pins on your micro.”
- 8-Bit Parallel-In/Serial-Out Shift Register – 74HC165N – £1.00
“… neat little IC that will take an input of up to 8 parallel lines and produce a single, serial output.” - DIP Sockets Solder Tail – 16-Pin 0.3″ – £1.03
- or build the SensorAktor-Shield designed by Lab3 (Laboratory for Experimental Computer Science at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne – plenty of other interesting Arduino projects here too) – “The SensorAktor-Shield is an extension for the Arduino Board that allows to get quick into the world of sensors and aktuators” - and a thorough Making Things guide. It’s a self-build but there’s PDFs for the ‘Bill of Materials’, ‘SensorAktor-Shield schematic’ and a ‘Library’.
A Pins in the Arduino post at chiphacker had some interesting suggestions too – including the shift register above and:
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- a Controlling Lots of Outputs from a Microcontroller post on Tom Igoe’s code, circuits, & contruction site,
- Arduino I2C Expansion I/O
- the Analog/Digital MUX Breakout - £3.39 – “used to connect 16 analog sources (like sensors) to 5 pins on a microcontroller” at sparkfun.com
- the EZ-Expander shield – from nootropic design “… makes it easy and inexpensive to add digital output pins to your Arduino… so overall you get 13 additional output pins.” – fully assembled and tested for US$17.95
- the DFRobot MEGA Sensor Expansion Shield – $16 – “easily connect a number of commonly used sensors”
I also needed some orange LEDs for the POV Display and found:
5mm Orange LED – £0.15
MINIATURE 3MM PURE ORANGE LED (RC) – £0.075 1+, £0.05 – 100+
Useful resources found on the way – Tom Igoe’s excellent code, circuits, & construction blog – “code and fabrication resources for physical computing and networking”
As if all this wasn’t ‘food-for-thought’ enough I browsed the Eski Ingredients PDF for yet more sensor types and came across capacitive touch sensors – “… used extensively in consumer electronic devices like iphones, laptop touchpads and buttons, but they can also be used as localized proximity sensors, or turning non-conductive materials like glass into physical interfaces for all kinds of electronics projects.”… and it’s opened up an entirely new line of enquiry which I’ll need to document in a separate post…
Hmmm… a DIY touch sensitive musical interface…
