My Arduino arrived Saturday and inside of an hour I had a proof-of-concept prototype of SEKRET PROJECT DEVICE assembled and coded. The pseudocode I’d been carrying in my head, as integrated with a physical circuit, worked nearly perfectly (an odd audio tone at the top end of the potentiometer is the only gotcha involved, I can’t figure it out… though perhaps a higher quality potentiometer will help).

Today my protoshield arrived: part 2 of my grand Arduino adventure. The Ard is configured specifically so that a second chip above it can connect to its in/output pins, as well as its power. They call these second chips ‘shields’. A protoshield is a shield to which you can attach a mini-breadboard, to have your circuits all put together ahead of time before hard-wiring such a thing. Needless to say it’ll be useful as all hell.

Unlike the Ard, the protoshield needed assembly. So! Out came the trusty soldering iron and a simple set of components had to be attached to the PCB. Very easy to do, truth be told, but it’s always nice to accomplish even something small like that. I guess the little resultant buzz is one of the core components of the whole build-shit-your-damn-self/MAKE trend.