Sparkfun & Arduino announced today the new Arduino Pro ($20) and Arduino Pro Mini ($19), two 3.3V “low-cost, low-profile boards intended for advanced users and for convenient embedding in long-term projects”.

The Arduino Pro is shield compatible (but 3.3v, beware) and includes a connector for lithium ion batteries. The Arduino Pro Mini is well….mini at .73″x1.3″ (while the Arduino Nano is 0.73” x 1.70”, with a mini USB port and 5V operating voltage but costs $50).

Both are great candidates for permanent projects, I’ll evaluate them when I get back from my September liveaboard trip.

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In a previous post I reviewed the Arduino Diecimilla and some of its shields. The Diecimilla and its proto-shield provide us with a great sandbox for experimenting with basic circuits on a mini-breadboard. If you can leverage some of its shields to provide additional functionality you don’t want to have to implement yourself (GPS, SD card logging, Motor control, LCD, …) the Diecimilla ecosystem is a great set of building blocks for complex circuits.

But let’s back up for a second and explore what different use cases are:

• Assemble existing components with some prototyping
• Prototype using breadboards
• Build semi permanent circuits
• Build permanent circuits using perfboards
• Build permanent circuits with custom PCB for small runs

Any others you can suggest ? Feel free to comment !

Arduino Diecimilla

Pros:

• Multitude of shields available
• ProtoShield for semi-permanent circuits (perfboard) or prototyping (breadboard)
• Very well finished product
• Diecimilla can be powered via USB or DC power (9V battery, wall wart, …)
• Direct support in Arduino IDE

Cons:

• Bigger than Boarduino, Stamp, Stickduino and Nano Arduino.
• Multiple shields rarely stack up physically and are often incompatible as they use the same pins
• Price: $35 (assembled)
• Harder to embed than some into permanent projects

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Apparently, this is what I am into if you believe my del.icio.us tags, as visualized by Wordle:

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As I read blogs and articles about DIY electronics projects, I learn about gizmos that I want to gain first hand knowledge on.

One such are small LCD screens (not monitors !) which are available from many vendors. Following the Arduino tutorial, I discovered that many require up to 11 pins on the Arduino.

Sparkfun sells a serial LCD backpack that allows you to drive an LCD screen with just one pin (in addition to 5V and GND).

Since I wanted a minimalist solution, I didn’t use a microcontroller such as the Arduino but directly drove the serLCD from a (serial) USB connection. Sparkfun happens to sell the Breakout Board for FT232RL USB to Serial which allows a USB to serial communication using the (Windows, MacOS X or Linux) FTDI drivers (the same IC and drivers are used to on the Arduino Diecimilla).

The breakout board is easy enough to use. After clearing the solder jumper and tying the 5V output to VCCIO, the breakout board is configured for 5V power.

Next thing to do is to place the breakout board on a breadboard (after soldering two 8 pins headers to it), solder a wire to GND on the breakboard and tie it to one of the bus strip. Tie the VCC from a terminal strip to the other bus strip. At this point, you’ve exposed GND and VCC and TX is available on a terminal strip (Pin 1 of the FT232L breakout board).

Grab your serLCD enabled LCD screen, wire ground and VCC in and connect the LCD’s RX to the FT232L TX. Connect the breakout board to your computer via USB and the LCD should ‘boot’ up and wait for serial transmission. On a Mac, you’d type in a terminal something similar to:


screen /dev/usb.tty-FT232L 9600


and whatever you type will appear on the LCD. To leave screen, type ‘CTRL-a’ followed by ‘\’. Never unplug your USB serial device on a Mac before you’ve quit the application or freed the device in some way, you’d crash the USB drivers and no USB device would work until you reboot.

I got a lot more to say about this subject, how it ties to software like LCDSmarties (Windows) or LCDproc (Mac OS X, Linux), how an 8 bit or 4 bit LCD might work better, coupled with an Arduino, but I’ll leave this for next time.

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I am always up for the deep, cold, long challenging dives.

So when an opportunity came along to dive the wreck of the Pinthis, I jumped on it. The wreck is nearly 100 feet of deep freezing waters (barely hitting high 40s), a rough (flat seas) and long (40 minutes) trip from the (rich and prosperous) town of Scituate MA.

In any case, my buddy Sam and I drove down that morning of the fifteen of August, 2008, from Boston to Scituate. Sam was diving his Meg rebreather and I dove my O2ptima. We boarded Fran Marcoux’s excellent boat, the DayBreaker, in the Scituate marina.

Except for the fact that my VR3 shut down at 30 feet, the dive was pretty great, the weather gorgeous. The Pinthis is a great turtled oil tanker, which you can penetrate through and through. Plenty of cods inside, a few lobsters and large crabs as well as sunflower seastars. I also saw a very large flounder, not that Sam would care for he only loves rusting metal.

The followin is my first attempt at taking a video of a boat dive and using my video lights so please be nice:

Wreck of the Pinthis from Erik Dasque on Vimeo.

Note that the first song is an original sountrack that was written for my father’s underwater documentaries serie called “Le Monde sous le Masque”

(I am iteratively working on editing this video so should the link stop working, you’ll find a new version on my Vimeo page ).

If you’re a rebreather diver in new england, make sure to let us know and we’ll dive together !

Dive data:
Wreck of the Pinthis, 08/15/08, AM, Fran Marcoux Daybreaker, departing from Scituate

• dive 1: 99 ft – 43 mins – 46.5 degrees
• dive 2: 100 ft ! – 39 mins – 46.5 degrees

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I have been playing with Arduinos for a few months but I am far from being an expert. However, I thought it’d be interesting to provide a quick review and guide on the different boards out there and what they’re good for. If you don’t know what an Arduino is, make sure you read my introduction post.

I’ll cover a lot of different boards such as the Stickduino, BoardDuino (DC & USB) and the new Sanguino but for now let’s start with…

the Arduino Diecimila

The Diecimila was my first Arduino and the only one I have that’s made by the Arduino people. It comes fully assembled and is very clean and easy to use. Since I use a Mac for most of my projects, I mostly chose USB based Arduinos. The Diecimila can be powered by USB or through a standard barrel plug (from a 9V battery, a wall wart or really anything from 7V to 12V). The power source is selected by a jumper (similar to the old IDE drives jumpers).

A cool feature of the Diecimila is the availability of compatible shields. A shield is a daughterboard that stacks on top of the Arduino Diecimila or NG.

Theoretically you should be able to stack many such shields on top of each other but most shields I tried were not designed to stack all that well.

Sometimes, even when they do stack up, they turn out to be incompatible as they use the same pin. Some, cleverly designed let you wire in whichever pins you’d like to use (the GPS Logger shield from Adafruit as well as of course the proto shield come to mind).

In practice I found most shields to be useful to learn and experiment with a particular subject but inadequate to build a project using several of them. While the Diecimila is not the only board in the Arduino family I found it to be the nicest one so far.

I have tried a few shields, assembled/soldered from a kit or bought already assembled, including:

• Proto Shied
• XBee Shield • Wireless (not Wi-fi)
• Motor Shield
• GPS Data Logger (SD Card) Shield
• LCD Shield

Other shields I have seen but not used include:

• Xport Shied • Ethernet
• Wave Shield • Sound
• Battery Shield

Adafruit Proto Shield (from Adafruit)

This was my first shield as it came with the Adafruit Arduino Starter Pack (which includes a Diecimila). The Protoshield is probably the most useful shield so far.

Beyond providing access to the Arduino pins (which the Diecimila already does), it includes a switch and 2 LEDs (and their resistors) connected to ground. You can use those for anything you want, most likely connected to one of the digital pins (or possibly analog pins for the LEDs). The Protoshield can be used with a mini-breadboard for solderless prototyping. Or you can use Proto Shields to build semi-permanent prototypes by soldering directly onto the perfboard which constitutes the core of the shield.

I have been using the Proto Shield with mini-breadboard quite a bit and have recently purchased a few of additional shields (sans breadboard) to build more permanent projects.

Of note are two products from LiquidWare which are essentially double-sized proto shields, the Double-wide and Double-tall ExtenderShields. I have not tried them but they look pretty interesting for one-off semi permanent projects which require the larger workspace (which most probably will do).

That’s all I say for now about the Diecimila and the Proto Shield. In later posts, we’ll look at some other shields and Arduino compatible boards. Until then…

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Just received the two Stickduinos I had ordered.

Not sure what I am going to do with them just yet but they look like a great way to build a USB HID device

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No it don’t. Chris did a really good job with a cool design though:

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Yesterday, I started reading Night Watch, a Russian science fiction novell from which the eponymous movie Night Watch, was adapted. So far it’s pretty good and as foreign as can be (as the movie is). But of course Russian & English literature are technically foreign to me

I started watching the movie a few weeks ago but had to stop because of lip syncing issue. I am waiting now for the next Netflix envelope with subtitled goodness inside.

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My friend Matt Kojalo sent me the following URL recently as the battle for enterprise capable mobile devices rages on.

My knee-jerk reaction was “that guy…lost me at ‘However, with the release of the $199 iPhone, which syncs with
Microsoft Outlook on a PC’, … The guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about…”

Then someone in the thread provoked me with “Blackberries 4 EVA !” In my job at BzzAgent, I took over IT in addition to my normal duties and had to deal with blackberries for all sales people and executives so I wrote a little note back (it’s a little pretentious, please forgive me) :

“Heya,

Blackberries are fine, I use one at work. They’re like emacs, a command line text editor, it does the job extremely well and is streamlined. The job in this case is answering emails, reading emails, accepting meetings and checking your calendar. Beyond that, the blackberry falls short. It is the tool today for enterprise mobile use but it’s not going to last much longer. It started its existence as a glorified 2 way pager and its decline will follow soon.

The iPhone obviously redefines what a mobile platform can do. Sure, it has many issues which will need to be solved. While the battery life is far from ideal, already the keyboard is pretty good and Apple moved it to 3G which is more compatible with its lofty ambitions.

Surfing the internet with the iPhone mobile browser is beyond actually possible, it works and works well. Safari is an order of magnitude better than any mobile browser out there. Before that, browsing on a mobile device was an exercise in masochism or a lackluster experience at best. Now it’s something you can use every day with every site, not just the MLB standings page formatted for mobile phones.

Beyond that and though the SDK was late coming, we’ve seen more applications available for the iPhone in a month that ever were available for Blackberries. Sure some of them are a joke but we’re starting to see generic mission critical apps on the platform (Oracle Business Object, professional references, Medical Apps, Sales Force, various CRM). This coupled with VPN support, Exchange support and a capable browser to browse your company’s extranet and intranet sites.

So yes, today the RIM devices are still better for your basic email and calendaring but even there, the iPhone has become a strong contender. Beyond those basic features, the iPhone has re-defined was an enterprise mobile device can be. And the Blackberry is not it.

RIM’s strategy at this point is befuddling, they’re focusing on making new handhelds that look cool, with UI that look cool. Microsoft tried to copy Apple’s Mac OS X since 1984 with very little success, it’s an exercise in futility. Instead they should figure out what they need to leap forward in terms of enterprise mobile platform. This might involve a better SDK, UI toolkit, application distribution model, VPN support, partners, mobile browsing, …

But all of that would just help them get close to the iPhone, not better.

I discovered Blackberries in 1998 at Javaworld, have used once every day a few years after that and have had an iPhone since it launched last year. I stopped using my blackberry for work a few weeks ago.

Erik”

Now, reading it again, I realize that I failed at taking into account the administrative UI and rollout options for those. Of course, right now Blackberry has the upper hand there with many server based options to alter policies globally, restrict rights, reset handhelds, … But for that flexibility, you pay a hefty price of up to $100 per user. Also, of course Blackberries are available on all carriers while iPhones are restricted to AT&T in the US, something an enterprise might not want to standardize on.

There are many other criteria to compare them but in reality it’s Apple and Oranges (pun intended) since the iPhone as a device is so new and much more capable that it has redefined the space. All revolutions are not ideal and some enterprise needs might not be filled yet but it’s just a matter of time before the iPhone is 100% enterprise ready. I think.

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