So I am looking forward to getting my Ardiuno Uno starter kit that I ordered. As a young adult, I used to do a lot of electronics stuff but what you could do 20 plus years ago was a lot more primative then what can be done today with inexpensive microprocessors, modern light emitting diodes and much small electronic components. I’ve been thinking about doing this for some time, but now that winter is coming I will have more time …

The internet is full of interesting projects you can put together with the Andriuno, ideas on how you can easily program the microprocessor to produce a wide variety of signals. You can also order a wide variety of inexpensive components online, things that years ago would never have been found at your local Radioshack.

Some of the projects I am considering building over the coming weeks:

1) A countdown clock that I can keep running looking forward to various holidays or events. It would be fun to know how many days, minutes, and seconds to a specific holiday.

2) A color controlled LED strip. Maybe again set up a timer so that before bed I would hit a button and the lights would go red to make it easier to go to sleep, then gentally fade to black. Then at 7 AM, I would have the controller wake me up with a bright blue light that would fade to yellow then white over several minutes. The idea would be to make it easier to get up in the morning.

3) A circuit that would fade off the floor lights in my truck. Maybe have the lights go off like 2 minutes after I left the truck, then come back on as soon as noise was heard from opening the door.

These are some of the projects I envision building. I would need some extra components, like a battery backup clock chip, an RGB LED strip, external power supply, mounting boards and obviously additional Ardiunos Unos but all of those supplies are under $10 on the Internet.

None of these projects look to be too difficult to code or implement as the Ardiuno looks pretty simple to wire and code for per the Internet. Just some simple resistors, transistors, diodes and the alike. Basic math on resistance and load, plugging in wires. Tons of documentation on the Internet, plus I will get some booksout of the library on wiring Ardiunos.

I think this will be quite a bit of fun.