About:Y-aji

So recently, I have been playing around pretty heavily with shift registers. I had managed to shift data OUT pretty easily, but taking data in has proven a bit more difficult than I had expected.

There is a wonderful tutorial on http://www.arduino.cc on the 4021 PISO shift register (http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ShiftIn) however, having already been working with the 595 shift register for sending data to outputs, I decided to pick up a number of 74HC597N’s and just couldn’t get them to work. Continue reading

Well, I’ve gathered all my spare change laying around the house and purchased an Arduino board last week. For anyone that doesn’t know what Arduino is, it is a micro controller board that is based around c/java versus the standard stamp boards that are in basic.

These boards are around 35-40 dollars pre-assembled and are used with the ATMega328 chip. This is a significant decrease in the cost of the stamp controllers or the Lego Mindstorm junk. That stuff is just too expensive to get started with and Arduino bridges that price gap by removing some of the flare without removing any of the power. Take a look at their website with plenty of comprehensive information at http://www.arduino.cc.

The other great benefit of this stuff versus alot of the others is it’s all open source. The software, the hardware, the design information, everything is open for research and quite easy to find! Within a few days (with help of my father who has been doing this stuff for quite a few years with the stamp controllers), I had managed to not only start prototyping boards, but get a proof of concept on how I can make lots of these very quickly and cheaply by ordering just a few parts online.

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