So, here' my coming out for the other project I've been working on lately. Learning about Arduino's. More later about why I'm doing this but for now...
I got a regular Duemilanove from Adafruit a couple of weeks ago. These things are so nice that they include all of the basic necessary components like the USB to RS232, the automatic voltage input switching, pin headers etc. I've been fiddling with that and learning some of how it works. I wanted to get a second for the purposes of having the two Arduino's talk to each other. Naturally I decided to do this the harder way and assemble one on a breadboard.
This is actually pretty simple. The components you need are the Arduino flashed Atmega328p, a voltage regulator for getting your power source to a steady 5v, a clock source and a programming method. A couple of LED's are good for power and the pin13 status. Based on several resources around the web including:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/34908673@N00/4042185019/sizes/l/
http://arduinofun.com/blog/2009/10/15/breadboard-arduino/
I've managed to get my Boarduino up and running without the use of a reset button and hopefully with a few extra rows available on my breadboard. I'm using an FTDI cable from Adafruit since I had to pick one up for the XBee modules I got. Yes, more to come on that as well. The FTDI cable includes the chip for USB to RS232 conversion but it does not pull out the DTS pin. Thankfully Arduino supports auto-reset using the RTS pin. I had to struggle a bit to figure out why it wasnt' working but the fix was pretty simple. You need to enable "Set RTS on Close" on the serial port that's tied to the cable. Check out the LadyAda article for more details:
http://www.ladyada.net/make/boarduino/use.html
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