You’ve outdone yourself today… three arduino posts in a day.

Hey, I like all this Arduino stuff, and plan to get one soon.

When the $100 free day comes on Sparkfun, I’ll get an Arduino and this would be a great sheild.

@gordon

The chances of getting the $100 are slim. Only 1000 packages.

@Spork: I’d like to have a look. Sounds far more engaging that the usual that we’ve been seeing here..

@Spork

Seriously… Do you have a web site? If so, can you post the URL?

I’m curious about the chain maille work, myself.

Glad to hear Will O’Brien is still around. I miss all of his awesome posts here.

That said, there’s no real reason to hate the arduino other than just to bitch and moan for the sake of it. It’s a perfectly valid microcontroller and development platform, and the reason it’s “easy for everyone” is that ease of use speeds up development considerably.

If you had an idea for a project, (let’s say for the sake of argument that it’s an RGB keypad such as what Will developed) would you want to get it all going on an arduino quickly and easily with a few lines of code and work out kinks in the hardware with an easy-to-debug system such as, and THEN move on to a different controller? Or would you rather try your luck at slapping a Z80 in a breadboard, programming some EPROMS with machine code that you hope works with your mess of wires, and make a TTL clock generator, only to have to give the EPROM a UV bath to erase it and try some more code?

Seems like less hassle to just start with simplicity.

That said, there’s no real reason to hate the arduino haters other than just to bitch and moan for the sake of it.

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