I don’t know how many of you have heard about the Arduino single board computers, but they make and excellent platform for developing gadgets for the ham shack.  Here is a brief description of the Ardurino board.

Arduino Uno

Arduino is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physicalworld than your desktop computer. It’s an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board.

Arduino can be used to develop interactive objects, taking inputs from a variety of switches or sensors, and controlling a variety of lights, motors, and other physical outputs. Arduino projects can be stand-alone, or they can be communicate with software running on your computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP.) The boards can be assembled by hand or purchased preassembled; the open-source IDE can be downloaded for free.

I have been playing with an Arduino board in order to learn the basics of interfacing it to real world objects and developing simple programs that can gather information from and control these objections.  So far I have developed a simple program which reads a digital temperature sensor and display the sensor temperature on a small LCD display called a shield.  The Arduino can be accessed over a LAN using a LAN Shield.

Once I get a bit more experienced with the Arduino, I am going to try using to control some things around the ham shack.

Fred