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Review of an Arduino UNO

About a week ago I got this fun little box in my mailbox from the nice guys over at farnell.

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The first thought that crossed my mind was that it was smaller than I expected. I have never seen an arduino so this was a first for me. The build and solder quality of the board was great, and it worked nicely when I plugged it in the first time. I only ordered a plain arduino, so I got no software or anything with it. But it was easy enough to download from the arduino site.
I got some nice stickers with the arduino though. Pictures is in the slideshow.

The shipping from farnell went really fast, and arrived safely and in working condition.

I had some plans about what to do with it, since I had a HD44780 20x4 LCD display lying around, wondering if I could connect that to the arduino.
After some quick browsing around in the arduino examples, I found the wiring scheme for the HD44780. I didn't have a breadboard when I played with this, or proper cables to test with, so I found some old CAT-5 cable that I just used the pairs of. Worked great for my testing, and no need for a breadboard with just a couple of wires needing to be connected to the display.

Then I started the coding of the arduino. First of all I tried out the basic examples that followed the kit and it worked pretty good. The coding language of it is pretty readable for anyone that has done any coding before.

Then I started experimenting on my own. First I tried to get a PHP script to send text to the display, but that failed because of something wrong with the serial connection on my server, so I just tried to get it to display text and such, and that worked. :3

Added some pictures here of the arduino with the display connected. Planning to use it to make a cool clock or something like that, going to get an Ethernet shield and connect it to the internet! Probably going to make it show the time and such in binary and Unix time.

So I haven't nearly unleashed the arduino's full power, and it is a powerful little micro-controller that I will have a lot of fun with it.

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