A Arduino board

[DavisC]

Well I am the programmer for team 539, and as some extra experience and of course some fun I've been looking into getting an Arduino board.
So I'm pretty much just asking to anyone who has one, what is your experience with them?
also I was thinking that I could make a super mini robot considering it acts like a tiny cRIO and Digital Side Car combined.

-Davis

[galewind]

We used an arduino board and IFI electronics system to create a "wood chopping machine" for our High School's rendition of Beauty and the Beast two years ago. We slapped a breadboard onto it to make the circuitry for the PWMS more manageable, and it worked like a charm! It ran two motors with the standard old FRC electronics set-up, powered by an arcade button and a large limit switch. It involved timer code to power a window motor to oscillate a plastic axe which chopped a pre-split chunk of wood, and it used a van door motor to turn two giant foam gears and an old anemometer to look "gadgety".

Programming it was a piece of cake! They're very fun to work with.

[baronep]

I have an arduino and I think that it is awesome. I've done everything from creating a miniature robot platform, to creating an email door lock to creating a 4x4x4 led cube. You can use serial communication to communicate to your computer (or even the cRIO if you felt like it). I have communicated between a Visual Basic desktop application and the arduino. I have the 'mega' which is about $80, but the uno is less than $30 if I remember correctly. I would highly recommend.

[sanddrag]

I have a custom designed board based on the Uno design, and I went from zero experience programming in Arduino to having a reasonably complex mini-sumo robot fully programmed, with SPI and I2C devices, infrared sensors, and h-bridges, in a single weekend. That says something about its ease of use.

[xisybyl]

FYI - National Instruments now has LabVIEW Support for the Arduino Uno. See https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-16024

[TomH]

My Arduino board (Uno) hasn't become a robot or anything like that, but I think learned a lot from it, and the possibilities are as endless as the number of PWM ports you have. Be cool to see a FIRST league that uses arduino.

[Kusha]

I got my first arduino about 5 months ago, right now I'm finishing up a kiwi bot with it as the microcontroler.

[xitaqua]

We are building a quad-copter with Arduino, our hope is to have the quadcopter and be able to communicate with a ground robot.

[MichaelBick]

Actually I'm thinking of doing the same things. As I am NOT the programmer, but am CADder, I felt like it would help me to communicate to them what needed to be done. I have been working closely with a book and highly recommend it: Intermediate Robot Building by David Cook. Good luck.

[jacob9706]

I have recently started playing with an Arduino UNO yesterday and It is a great learning tool. It was my first experience with C. I am learning it along with a new programmer. We are just playing around with LED's and Servos.

If Anyone is interested you can integrate the Arduino boards with Processing. If you have never heard of Processing, it is a visual processing tool writen in Java.

Head over and check it out at http://processing.org/

If you have ANY questions on how to get it up an running with your Arduino board add me on skype jacob97061

I am happy to answer any questions and lend a helping hand. If you havn't seen it already, after last season I had gotten the kinect up and running and posted the code over in the programming forums.

[MichaelBick]

I know the Arduino ide allows you to program in C/C++. I was wondering how similar programming in Arduino is to using C++ and the WpiLib library, specifically if you can program similarly to C++ in Arduino's software.

[DavisC]

I recieved my Arduino board this past weekend, and i think its amazing.

Right now I am messing with a robotics servo conected to it. And since it works through basic PWM, wouldn't I be able to connect a PWM slot on the board to a Victor (powered by the old-style power boards) and control a 12V motor; and make a full robot from it?
I see how well that work sometime!

Thanks for all the input