arduino – Imablog

Inspired by the Sparkfun Arduino and Breadboard holder, I decided to build my own portable work station to use for building projects with my *duinos.

I cut a 27.7cm x 40.5 cm piece of 6mm thick (1/4″) plywood from stuff I had on hand to serve as the base, and started playing around with how I wanted things laid out. I eventually settled on a setup with three breadboards around the *duino board (in this case, a Sparkfun RedBoard) and a little parts bin on the side.

Sparkfun RedBoad workstation with breadboards

Scrounged up some nylon standoffs and screws to mount the board to the plywood and I ended up with this.

I can switch between the Netduinos and RedBoards pretty easily, and it gives me plenty of breadboard space to work on. The parts bin stays on the board thanks to the magic of Velcro^™ and I used the adhesive backing on the breadboards to stick them to the plywood.

Still have plenty of room on the left side to put other things. Now I’ll be able to easily pick up my projects and move them somewhere else to work on.

I found the Make Getting Started with Netduino kits on clearance at Radio Shack for $20, so I decided to pick one up (rescuing more clearance items). Figured it would be a good way for me to get my feet wet in the Arduino and microcontroller world.

A Make: Getting started with Netduino kit and a Netduino board

The board it self is pretty small, maybe a little smaller than 10x10cm.

A Netduino microcontroller board. The board has the same form factor as an Arduino microcontroller board.

The kit contains everything you need for the basics like making LEDs blink, a little speaker, a little bread board for prototyping and even a servo motor.