Arduino Microcontrollers

Arduino Boards

Arduino-brand Uno - My first Arduino hardware was the Arduino Uno R3 Board, purchased from Amazon.com, along with the book, Programming Arduino Getting Started with Sketches by Simon Monk. Delivery of these two items from Amazon was hyper-fast, even considering that I went with the free delivery. Mid-February, 2013.

The Uno was part of a bundle, by Newsite, sold through Amazon. It is an authentic Arduino board. The bundle included: Arduino-brand Uno R3, Breadboard, Holder, Jumper Wires, USB Cable and 9V Battery Connector

LinkSprite SD Card Shield - One of the first shields that I have purchased was the LinkSprite SD Card Shield. I bought it on eBay, very inexpensively, but it took 34 days to arrive here in New Hampshire, from China. The board is well-made, with nice clean solder joints. This shield is version 1.0b.

AT24C32 Real Time Clock Module - Another shield from China. This one I intend on using to provide date and timestamp information into a text file, in comma-delimited format, for my hydroponics project and my solar panel charging station project (arrived late April 2013. I need to solder some header strip to this board, then I will be checking it out. If this works as expected, then I will buy several more of them. I will be using this RTC module in my Solar-powered Hydroponics project, in my Orchid Case project and in my Solar Panel Monitoring project.

The AT24C32 RTC Shield was a dud, it arrived from China DOA, and when I tried to remove the lithium battery, the clip snapped right off. El cheapo!

So, I resorted to building my own shields, using parts from Digikey and prototyping shields, bought from the local Radio Shack.

My Homebrew RTC Shield (I actually made 5 of these, foreseeing that they would be handy for data logging)

Arduino Sensors

Virtuabotix-brand Temperature & Humidity DHT11 Sensor Module - The DHT11 was the first sensor that I bought, two of them, actually. I got sort of bored with not having an input device, so I chose to go with this for my first imput device. Late-March, 2013.

2013-04-09 - Finally took some time to pop this into the breadboard and play with the sensor. It's accuracy seems to match my Fluke-brand infrared thermnometer right to one-tenth of one degree (Farenheit). The temperature and humidity data was streamed at one second intervals to the serial monitor. Once I familarize myself with the LCD shield, I will stream the data to it.