A Parts Order Arrives

I've been really busy lately. We moved out of the apartment and back on/in to the boat. But an order did come in the morning of the move. I only had a chance to verify that it was a fun box, before I had to close it up and get to work! It mostly was more stuff for building boards and SMD part sets plus a new Arduino clone from Evil Mad Scientists, the Daivolino. I had bought a datalogger shield back when I first started on the AmpHour project, but have not gotten around to testing it because of having to figure out how to connect it to my plain boards. So the $10 daivolino looked just too good. And it is. 20 minutes to solder up in the new panavice Jr.

A few of the parts, Diavolino, FTDI friend, 4x20 blue display, Panavice Jr, jumper wire set and 15x lighted loupe with headband.

I had to hook it to something so there was the new blue/white 4x20 LCD display! A url on the package had the Arduino LCD test suite. It passed all tests and  is simple to use. It does consume too many pins though.

The package of jumper wires are really nice to use with the breadboard!

4x20 ran all the examples

Then on to the datalogger. It has a real time clock chip besides the SD card holder, so I ran all the arduino IDE tests for each part. It too worked well and easy. One note, the CS chip_select in the IDE tests is set to pin 4 but the Adafruit datalogger uses pin 10. it only took about 15 minutes of digging to find that.

Adafruit's datalogger shield attached

So I have lots to play with and no time to play! The ACS714 current sensor below is still packed in a box, as are the 758's 100 and 150 amp sensors.

I also got a package of powdered Tinit mix to try on the next board. Also a 0805 resistor/capacitor kit, hand PC board drill, and lots of little stuff. The resistor kit I picked came as lots of unmarked paper strips in a big ziploc bag. After I ordered it I found a kit in cool little individual boxes. 20x20 hindsight sucks!