The Daily Duino

There has been quite a flurry of development revolving around the official ethernet shield recently. Here are what I consider a few of the more important changes.

Ethernet fixes – There are some connection issues with the ethernet library with regard to incomplete disconnects. Since the wiznet chip only supports 4 simultaneous connections, this manifests itself pretty quickly if you are trying to poll a server for changes. Etracer, from the arduino forums, found and fixed this problem and has released a new client.cpp as well as detailed the issues in a post to the arduino developers mailing list.

Another recent addition is Ben Combee’s Webduino library, which greatly simplifies processing html forms when using the arduino and ethernet shield as a web server. The library and basic examples are available at: http://code.google.com/p/webduino/

Bjoern Hartmann’s UDP library has also been used for a couple of recent projects including work on DNS/DHCP and fellow Infonomicon member Cynshard’s work on a NTP library. The NTP library is particularly useful since it can be combined with the software Date/Time library to have fairly accurate time without adding a hardware realtime clock to your project.

As you can see, there seems to be a lot of development activity ongoing for the official ethernet shield and since the addition of networking to the arduino greatly expands its possible uses, I think we’ll see even more. Please remember to thank these folks for their code and bugfix contributions…

The Arduino team has recently released an Official Ethernet Shield.  I was having trouble with my Adafruit XPort shield as you have to configure the XPort and it takes a lot of code to get it going.  This Arduino stuff is supposed to be easy and fun, and the XPort is not.  The official ethernet shield though is wonderful.  You have to upgrade the ide to version 12 to get the ethernet library.  The shield uses SPI to communicate (the library takes care of this) so you only loose digital pins 11, 12 and 13.  It also brings all of your pins up in the same location, so that you can mount another shield on top.

The official Ethernet Shield is also ~$40 so its not a bad price.  NKC has them in the states.

I plugged in a board with 3 linear pot’s and edited the basic web server sketch to be a little more to my liking.

When I browsed to the Arduino on port 80, this was displayed

My code is here: http://dailyduino.com/code/ethernetshield/webserver.pde

Writing a sketch for the Ethernet Shield is very easy, change the ip address, maybe the subnet mask, and its pretty easy.

Several of my favorite Arduino/Freeduino stores have sent us in some giveaways for the con.  We are not sure how we are going to be giving things out, as most are kits, I think we will be giving them out during our talk and during the tutorials going on during the day.  Maybe get a few teams together during the talk and give them each a board to put together and do a project off of.  Then give more coolness away for the team that makes the coolest stuff, I guess I need to bring a big box of parts.

Paul from Modern Device sent in 3 rBBB’s, 2 P4 RS232 to TTL Serial Adapter Kits, 2 LCD117 Serial LCD Boards, 2 16×2 blue LCD’s and a Serial Cable.

Lady Ada from Adafruit Industries gave us a Motor Shield and a Wav Shield.

NKC Electronics sent in 3 x Freeduino USB kits and 2 x Freeduino serial kits.

I owe each of these folks something and I am working on it.  Please check out their stores for the coolness.

OLED Touch Screen

Found a rather neat shield for the Arduino environment, it’s called the TouchShield.  Basicly it offers a fairly quick and easy way to display text, graphics and images from the Arduino.  Not only is it a 128 x 128 OLED screen, it also is a touch screen! (hence the name…)

Coming in at around $140, the TouchShield is not the cheapest of shields, but seems to offer a large range of possibilities (not to mention sexiness).

It was originally made available at the Liquidware Store, but currently seems to be sold out.  If you are not familiar with Liquidware, you should check them out!  They are up to some really neat stuff!  SparkFun Electronics has also started carrying the TouchShield, so if you just have to have one… looks like they still have a few in stock.

Also, it appears that it’s not insanely difficult to use.  Liquidware also has a good assortment of tutorials to get you going; including on entitled, “Up and Running in 5 Minutes”.

Be sure to read through the Liquidware Blog, which is full of good posts and ideas! They are doing a lot of great work with the Arduino, Open Source Hardware,  and various tutorials.  If you’re into Arduino this would be a blog worth adding to the feed list.

If you would like to know more about the TouchShield, here are some links to get you going!

Get the TouchShield:

• TouchShield at Liquidware store: http://www.liquidware.com/products/show/TS/TouchShield+Stealth
• TouchShield at SparkFun store: http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8817

Learn about the TouchShield with Liquidware tutorials:

• Up and Running in 5 Minutes: http://antipastohw.blogspot.com/2008/04/touchshield-up-and-running-in-5-minutes.html
• Accelerometer Graphing: http://antipastohw.blogspot.com/2008/05/touchshield-2-axis-accelerometer.html
• Serial Communications: http://antipastohw.blogspot.com/2008/05/touchshield-serial-communications.html