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Making the Shrimp is a great way to get started with Arduino technology. The Shrimp is a low-cost Arduino clone on a breadboard. Once you've prototyped a Shrimp-based project you'll probably want to make a more permanent version, and stripboard is a great way to do that. The Shrimping It! website offers a low-cost stripboard kit and has a few pictures to get you started, but I suspect some beginners would like some more detail. I'm about to make a simple prototype for a new project I'm working on and I thought it would be worth while documenting the process. This is not a soldering guide: if you need one, the Shrimping site recommends this . Kit contents The stripboard kit contains three items: a generously sized stripboard, a strip of headers, and a DIL socket. You'll need the contents of a standard Shrimp kit as well. You'll also need some tools. I used a soldering iron a small fume filter a pair of wire cutters a polisher to clean the ...

is your brainchild going to work? You've built your latest (or maybe your first) Arduino clone. It might be breadboarded , on stripboard , or a PCB . You've visually checked the connections, over and over, and maybe done some quick continuity checks with a multimeter. Everything looks fine. But will it actually work? Follow these steps to check it out. Use blink - The Secret Sauce Here's my secret sauce for building testable clones: Use a chip that has both a bootloader and the standard blink sketch pre-loaded . Use a 5V LED for testing. Let's look at those in a bit more detail. Use a chip that has both a bootloader and the standard blink sketch pre-loaded When you test your clone with a pre-prepared chip, you're starting with a known good core component. If the blighter doesn't blink you know you've made a mistake in the wiring. For more detail on why this is a goo idea on courses, see here . A 5v LED is the tester's friend Many make...

There's a revolution underway in Computer Science education. The Raspberry Pi has generated a huge amount of energy and enthusiasm, but there's also a lot of interesting activity around the Arduino. One great Arduino resource is the Shrimp, a low-cost compatible design aimed at educators and hobbyists with limited budgets. Landing the Shrimp You can find out more on the Shrimping It  blog. It describes ' the Shrimp  – a substitute for the Arduino Uno, which can be constructed for about a tenth of the price of the official board, shown here in stripboard and breadboard versions.' Note the absence of a PCB version! That's deliberate: the idea is that you will lean more, and feel more of a sense of ownership, if you have constructed the shrimp from scratch. That makes sense but I can see two situations where shrimp-catchers might prefer a PCB to work with. Some beginners starting out on their own might feel more confident building a PC...

I've made good progress with Veroduino - the Arduino clone I'm building on Veroboard™*. I like to build up complex circuits from pluggable components. They are easier to test, easier to replace, and can often be used in more than one project. I started by building a pluggable power supply on a small piece of strip-board; it contains a 5v regulator, and includes a bridge rectifier to provide polarity protection. Next I started on the board that carries the micro-controller. I abandoned my first prototype; the strip-board turned out to be too wide, covering the breadboard pads that connect to the pins of the micro-controller. I didn't feel too bad about that; the reason that I prototype is to discover design flaws early. I also verified that my mechanical design plugged into the board correctly. It's tempting to use PCB header pins, but they don't play well with this design. They work really well with a two-sided PCB, because the header can be soldered from the top. ...

Readers will know that I'm a fan of the Arduino, as is my daughter Alex . We currently share an Arduino board. I'm in the middle of a lengthy project, and I don't want to delay her access to the board. The obvious solution is to get a second Arduino. An Arduino Duemilanove board costs about £25 in the UK , and I'd prefer not to spend that much. Luckily the Arduino is open source, so lots of companies have developed their own versions. One popular alternative is the Boarduino from Adafruit , shown above. It's an Arduino clone with a much smaller footprint. You can't use standard Arduino Shields, but you can plug it into a breadboard - hence the name. If you're based in the UK .:Oomlout:. currently offer the Boarduino for £13.50 . I'd willingly spend that much, but a quick web search turned up two even cheaper possibilities; the Paperduino and the Stripboard Arduino . The Paperduino is a cool idea, but I'm looking for something a bit more robust, a...