I recently signed up for an electronics "road test" and was grateful to be selected along with 19 other participants to create a holiday lighting project, with help of the following hardware, thanks to Element14, Infineon, and MCM Electronics:
- Arduino Uno R3
- Arduino Yún
- Infineon Lighting RGB LED Shield
Today I finally got my hands on the following hardware (it had been waiting in an UPS store since Friday) and was able to unbox it.
First impressions
Arduino Uno R3
I know this is the bread and butter of micro computing, and I'm excited to finally have one. The board comes clean and free from fingerprints or leftover flux. It has "Made in Italy" proudly stamped on it, as a testament to it's legitimacy. In my very first sketch ever, I tried out the basic blinking sketch. I then found a Morse Code sketch which writes messages by blinking the onboard LED at pin 13. Works great for me because I still have a lot of hardware to buy!
Arduino Yún
The Yún looks quite like the Uno except for it's Ethernet port. This board arrived dirtiest of the bunch, with noticeable leftover flux and fingerprints on the metal shield which covers the WiFi chip and the Atheros chip that runs Linux OpenWrt. It is made in Taiwan, which is supposed to have significantly better electronics quality than China so I am not overly worried about the flux and fingerprints.
I will use this board to have some amount of interfacing via the Internet, as per the Internet of Things theme of this Element14 road test.
Infineon RGB LED Lighting Shield
This shield is a brilliant beautiful shade of something between dark orange and red, and I am very excited to get started with this board as well. I was talking to Robert Peter Oakes and he pointed out that I cannot power my 5V NeoPixel esque light strip on this board, because it is more suited to loads that are 6V and higher. He suggested I check out some other LEDs with larger voltages that will make use of this board. My NeoPixel strip is best powered with a wall adapter power supply that can push 5V with about 3-5A of current, and I will likely power these directly of my Uno.
One initial note when handling the Infineon is that I realized that this shield does not arrive with the interfacing pins required to mount this on this on the Uno or Yún. That means unless you have the means and ability to solder well, this is not a beginner board.
One key advantage to the Infineon is that it is able to control current flow, allowing quick prototyping of LEDs. It will take a bit of learning for me to actually put this shield to use!
Unwrapping the package yields some beautiful little packages with bright colouring. I can't wait!
Here are all three of the products
The Arduino Uno R3
The Arduino Yun
The Infineon RGB LED Lighting Shield. Note the lack of interfacing pins, meaning that you have to solder!
Here are all 3 of the products
This is my second sketch - the Uno is writing my name in Morse code