I missed the start of PubSub Huddle on Friday due to the catastrophic failure of the local railway system. Luckily I can now catch up using the podcasts.

Once I got there I spotted Andy Piper tinkering with the Arduino kit he had been using to demo some stuff with MQTT. I was inspired.

I don’t have an Arduino kit myself yet, but I did some time ago buy some TI LaunchPads, which are a total bargain at $4.30 each. I’d had a brief play with one set when visiting a friend in the US who had kindly acted as the posting address for me, but I’d not yet created any project.

The boards come with the installed chip preconfigured with a temperature sensing application much like the one Andy was showing me, but I wanted to cut some of my own code. TI provide a bunch of sample apps, and some video tutorials, so it wasn’t long before I had some LEDs blinking.

My next challenge was to make something that would interest the kids. Blinking LEDs took me to morse code (starting with the obligatory S-O-S), which then took me to flashing the kids names in morse.

It was pretty trivial to get the microcontrollers working on breadboard, with juice from a 3V button cell and a resistor from VCC to RST to get things going. Then… soldering time – moving the components from the breadboard to some stripboard to make something a little more durable.

I tidied the code up this afternoon and put it on GitHub.

I might try hacking a robot next (this project looks fun), and an Arduino kit looks certain for this year’s Xmas list.