2011-09-19 Monday — Arduino

10:32am I got up about half an hour ago since I was up late last night reading about the Arduino and thinking of things I could do with it. It’s kind of hard to do much because I don’t have a soldering iron with me right now, and most of the stuff I got is in kit form, so I’ve only been able to play with things I can breadboard.

One thing about the Arduino is that since it’s a microcontroller, you do a lot of programming to get it to do interesting things. While you could hook up a lot of smart equipment with its own processing built-in, the fun is buying a cheap kit with a lot of dumb parts that you hook up to the pins on the Arduino, and let the microcontroller do a lot of the hard work through programs that do things like output NTSC video for a TV, or display things on a large grid of LEDs.

This got me researching the Atari 2600 and how it worked. The Arduino Uno, which is what I have, has a 16 MHz 8-bit processor, and it’s much more powerful than the 2600’s CPU. The 2600 did have a custom chip called the TIA, which created the color video and 2-voice audio output for the TV. The Arduino can only output black and white and 1 voice of audio without special circuitry, and it does it all through software. Obviously, the TV interface of the 2600 is a specialized thing and most Arduino units don’t need that kind of stuff.

The Arduino is pretty cheap, at $35 for the Uno, so there’s the possibility of connecting several of the together. I did find a SID emulator that runs on the Arduino CPU, and that’s all it does, so it needs another Arduino to control it.