1272: Diecimila

Finally, arduino is here after 15 days from the order( around 4 USD postal charge). Seems like postal service is not that bad after all .

For those who haven't yet been bored by my arduino references, well Diecimila is a microcontroller board with ATMega 168, and a USB Interface which makes microcontroller programming really easy. Effectively you can use Arduino as a small brain for anyTHING you want to build. The full set of functionality is available here . I hope to move on to/make Sanguino maybe in January 2009 ( around week 1285).
Though actual tinkering would require a bit of electronic minutiae purchase in my dear town. Just setting up basic infrastructure : avr-gcc , arduino ide ( :( a bit of java lurking around there, but not much of a direct issue i hope) USB Interfacing to electronic boards is really neat I guess, considering the fact that my laptop doesn't have a serial port. My megalith of a desktop does ( as an add-on), but in effect USB sounds like the future, or maybe I am already in the past with bluetooth and other wireless interfaces being the present.

For starters there is a whole set of interesting instructables at instructables.com . And well in the end there will always be reprap. But as you can see I am pretty far away from a self-replicating rapid prototyper.

If you think Diecimila sounds like a greek goddess or demon or something ( I thought so :P) well it is just 10k in Italian.

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I really need to start coding on constraint satisfaction (brl-cad) more regularly. Very few changes since gsoc.