Lately I’ve been entertaining myself by building a rebreather loop controller using the Arduino micro controller. This little open source board is really nice to work with for a number of reasons. Unlike many of the alternatives which employ proprietary programming languages, the Arduino simply uses “C”. It also has an IDE that runs the my Mac, and it enjoys an enormous development community.
I’m pretty new to this kind of thing, so I’ve been using web tutorials to work my way up from the most basic blinking LED to something that actually monitors oxygen sensors and populates an LCD with information. Some of the more valuable resources I have used are as follows:
- A really good five-part tutorial to get started
- A tutorial to get started with analog input
- Guide to using serial LCD’s from Spark Fun Electronics
- A solution to some common problems with interupts
- Some good examples of code using an LCD menu with three buttons
Don’t forget to check out all of the Arduino projects on Instructables.