The kids and I have a silly idea for an Arduino project involving doorbells. So I ordered some parts from Sparkfun in the US (love that site so much) and they arrived quickly:
Then I lashed together the bare basics to make sure what we want to do will work. Press the button:
Press it again:
etc
Amazing to see the reaction from the kids, even teenage friends of theirs. I think it’s the tactility and physicality of the whole thing. If it was a piece of code running on a PC or phone, I’m sure the response would have been “whatevah”
Next steps are to add all the other buttons and then start on the Raspberry Pi part of the project.
Off we go to Maplins now to get a few more little things for it and my other far more serious project (if you can figure out what one of the parts in the first pic is, you may be able to guess)
Try to NOT buy the Robotic Arm that can be controlled from the Arduino
Just saying!
The whole robotic thing is very attractive but I think I’ll focus them on making things from scratch first. Our attempts to connect a motor and servo to non-Technics Lego last weekend were hilariously bad.
So what do you plan to do with the Raspberry Pi? Are you going to connect the Arduino with the Raspi?
Hi Bart,
I’ve done that already so that I could run the Arduino IDE on RPi.
But the plan for both the doorbell project and the serious one is to have Arduino-RPi communicate over USB. The Arduino will handle all the sensor stuff and send it to the RPi, the the RPi will handle all the wifi, internet, OAuth etc. Much cheaper and more powerful than an Ethernet Shield or Wifi Shield (obviously a lot more power usage tho).