I am not much for DIY, home projects. I am still struggling with putting curtains up in my TV room.

However, while casually browsing different sites (including Make) I discovered the Arduino board, an easy to use electronic kit based on a powerful Microcontroller that spawned a family of companion products.

This ecosystem makes it easy to experiment with various sensors, motors, displays, actuators. Furthermore, the controller is programmable through your Windows or Mac OS X PC via USB, using the Wiring environment and programing language resembling a simplified C. Environment such as Flash or Processing interface easily to the Arduino making it trivial to plot data, log things to databases.

I thought I’d chronicle my experiments with different Arduino based projects as I painful try to remember the basic of electronics that were taught to me through high-school.

To start I bought the Arduino starter pack from Adafruit. There are quite a few different versions of the board out there, the hardware and software designs being available under copyleft. Some are USB based, RS232 or even Bluetooth; some are tiny (Arduino Nano), others a tad larger but not by much (such as the Arduino Diecimila I bought) and some have odd shapes (the Arduino Lillypad is one). Regardless of the one you get, they easily interface with your Mac/PC, programmable through a pretty neat IDE, get power through AC, USB and/or a battery and offer you access to a good number of Analog input and Digital input/output pins to control or read from a whole range of things.

Next ? Receiving my Adafruit Arduino starter pack and my first few projects.

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In our quest to put more hours on our rebreathers, Sam and I dove the stern of the Chester Poling yesterday, a classic new england dive. It was my first good pair of dives on the wreck. The first one was spent trying to figure out my respiratory rate on doubles trying to ‘move the boat’ and the second was aborted because of electronics failure on my rebreather.

Yesterday everything was great, viz was over 35 feet, the water was at 45F, current was moderate and the weather was gorgeous. Dave & Heather’s boat, the Gauntlet is a great vessel to dive from and a great crew.

Here is a yet unedited movie of the dive:

It was by no means a challenging wreck dive but a good solid dive for us to get better on our rebreathers. The dive parameters were:

1. 96ft, 49mins, 44.6deg F

2. 96ft, 46mins, 46.0def F

I was thinking of my dad throughout, he’s the reason I started diving since he had shot so many underwater documentaries in the 60s. He turned 90 yesterday and he’s coming to visit me this week !

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