I recently gave in to the temptation to get an arduino. I managed to put off buying one long enough for tinker.it to run out of the useful looking starter kits so I decided go for a bit of variety and ordered a Freeduino SB instead. It arrived ahead of schedule today and it looks like a really nice part assembled kit- I dug out my soldering iron at the weekend, and I’ve got a fresh reel of solder, so I’m all set to put it together as soon as I get a chance:
Assuming it works when I’ve finished with it, and I can get an LED to flash, I’m hoping to try and get it communicating with my Home Easy sockets (getting an LED to come on using the Home Easy transmitter might be the first step).
Being a complete arduino novice, I think I’m going to need some help to get that working! My plan so far is to get a 433MHz AM transmitter and receiver module (there’s an RS Trade Counter near me) and try getting the arduino to understand the Domia Lite specification. So that’s more of a vague idea than an actual plan really! If you can help, either with what not to do when connecting an arduino to those modules, or how to program the darn thing, that’d be great- please leave a comment below!
Update: Just soldered the last few parts on the freeduino, and it blinks! (27 Jan 2009)
(I’m going to stop watching the blue flashing light any minute now…)
Update: now with spinning green thing! (28 Jan 2009)
What next? Something useful?!
Notes from a small field 
Great post James, I look forward to seeing how you get on. This is very similar to my set up and potentially the sort of thing I might get around to doing at home too given I have a home server rather like yours and I’m using Home Easy too!
So far so good- the freeduino works at least. Will probably try a few tutorials with it before attempting the Home Easy bit. If anyone knows any relevant arduino examples for that kind of thing, that’d be a bonus.
oooh! Shiny! :-)
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