I’ve been working with Arduino boards for a number of years, as shown by the dates on some of my older blog posts. In that time I’ve only used boards based on the ATmega8 (like the Duemilanove or Uno). The Due is the first Arduino board I have used in what I would call the Mega form factor.
Open source software that isn’t signed by an identified developer can cause headaches upgrading it on OSX. While working with the Arduino Due the first time, I downloaded 1.5 Beta of the Arduino IDE and ran into this error:
“Arduino is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Trash.
Here’s why you see the “… is damaged and can’t be opened” dialog and how to fix it.
After getting a couple of flashing lights working on a microprocessor, the next fun project is generally building some kind of Matrix. At first I built a 5×5 LED matrix which was relatively simple to solder together. When trying to make one much larger, the task because significantly more complex. That’s when I decided to build a LED Matrix Shield for the Arduino which did not use Charliplexing, like the LoL shield. I wanted something that was simpler to understand and (ultimately) code for. Unfortunately, 5mm LEDs means 8 columns x 6 rows, instead of the traditional 8×8.
While the Arduino Project Team provides their official Arduino forums, sometimes real-time help is just a bit better. When that is the case, I encourage you to visit the freenode.net IRC channel, #arduino. While as of today it is not an official channel, there are a number of great people available to help.
You can find me under the nick “baldengineer”, big surprise, I know. Others like kline, Yoston and pwillard are also excellent people to ping with questions.
When Serial data is transmitted to an Arduino, it is sent one byte at a time. Even though you might type “123” in the Serial Monitor, that’s not quite what is sent. Instead the bytes “1” then “2” then “3” are sent. Once received into a buffer on the Arduino, these individual bytes need to be reassembled into something useful.
