Arduino – neat stuff, “Raining” demo

At LCA2012, I spent some time learning about the poster child of the Open Hardware world, Arduino.

I bought the Pebble v2 demo kit and attended the “Arduino miniconf”, and the “bag schwag” included the Freetronics LeoStick.

Here’s a demo video I made of a Raining display on the LCD:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=C8twFFL32Zs

It uses the Pebble v2’s 20x4 LCD display and custom characters to display a “rain” effect (the LCD needs to be mounted sideways, as shown in the video). It could readily be extended to have different levels of rain based on CPU load or net traffic, or some other monitorable metric.

The code is available for download, along with a lot of other mini-projects I’ve hacked up in the last month.

I have a new hobby!