Question about the Arduino Inventors Kit

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1

Hi all,

I’m really interested in the Inventors Kit but I have a question about it. I’ve been doing a little research and from what I can gather, the kit is basically a development board?

Well, my question has to do with making a circuit autonomous from the kit. Let’s say we complete the CIRC-01 project and I now have a blinking light. From what I can see in the book and video, the blinking light is still tied to the development board. If I wanted to duplicate this circuit, what would I need to do? Would it be as simple as taking out the chip (or buying another one and programming it using the development board), attaching the leads to the correct pins and providing power to the chip? Or is that chip that I programmed unable to operate without all the circuitry on the dev board?

I hope someone understands what I’m talking about!

Thanks

2

Hi Shigon,

Thanks for the question. Your absolutely right. The Arduino is a development board. It is great for prototyping and experimenting on. The trick is, you can can learn the basics with the development kit. Once you have figured out what you want to build, and prototyped it on the big board, you can start breaking it down to a more bare bones, or “embedded” phase. We sell the ATmega with the Arduino bootloader so that you can start working with it without the complete board.

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/produc … ts_id=9217

If you decide that you need to simply blink an led, you will still need a micro controller, but you don’t need a lot of the extras that are on the board. So you can do something like this with the bootloaded chips…

http://www.instructables.com/id/Standal … readboard/

If you can figure out how to program a AVR alone with C (there are plenty of resources to learn out there), you could even go smaller with an ATtiny.

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/produc … ts_id=9378

Though I am not aware of an Arduino bootloader for ATtiny, so this only works if you look a little outside the Arduino box.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have other questions. :mrgreen:

3

Awesome. Thanks. I ordered one :slight_smile: I’ve always wanted to do something like this and I think I’ll have a lot of fun with it. I plan on taking what I learn from it and using it in an art project I’m cooking up.

FYI, I did some more research and found that you can also purchase some RBBB (Really Bare Bones Boards ) from various places to make life easier, too!