AmateurRadio.com

The Arduino project announced some news at MakerFaire 2011.  Here’s a video of a talk from Massimo Banzi:

In a nutshell, they are working on a new release of Arduino called “1.0″ or the “1.0 Core” which is going to break some things, but also set the stage for a more consistent and stable platform going forward.  There are new hardware revisions for the Uno and Mega boards.  The most notable change with these boards is the addition of several pins to support a two wire interface (I2C) bus which will enable much easier and standardized interfacing to shields.  There is also a new Arduino that has an Ethernet interface built in, rather than having to use a separate Ethernet shield.  (Shields are optional boards you can stack on Arduinos for additional capabilities.)  I’m very interested in this board as it also has an SD slot for memory storage.  I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a logger module for the keyer project.  Why?  Because I can and it’s never been done :-)

The project is also releasing a WiFi shield which opens up a lot of possibilities.  Another dream geek project I’ve had has been to place Arduinos in various places throughout the house and the yard for doing various things like reporting the temperature or sensing intruders.  The Arduinos could network via WiFi and report to each other or back to the mothership.

All and all it’s an exciting time in Arduino land.  If you haven’t tried using one of these little boards, you’re missing out on some fun.  The applications in amateur radio are endless and with the power and functionality steadily increasing, I expect in a few years we’ll be doing things like DSP or perhaps have a rig-on-a-shield.

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