Becoming a Maker [Geek Warning]

I've always been interested in electronics, but have never been very good at it. Lately I've gotten into working with the Arduino microcontroller system and I was looking for a project. Here my work life and my hobby life intersected:

This project was born out of necessity. We needed a way to interface our DriveSafety DS-600c simulator to our MindWare Technologies BioNex system.

While the BioNex can receive TTL signals via a 9-pin D-sub-miniature connector, there was not a good way to get at the serial port of the simulator's host machine while it was running. At least, not one that I could work out in a reasonable amount of time. However it was very easy to open a TCP socket from the simulator while it was running. With that socket open, we could send commands.

This suggested writing a program to run on one of the existing computers in the rack (there are eight of them right now). However, they are all pretty taxed during a simulator run, and space and temperature constraints suggested not adding another computer. This project, therefore, suggested finding a solution which met the following requirements:

1. a small footprint
2. low power consumption
3. easy programming
   
4. easy to interface with components etc.

Enter the Arduino: For this project I've used:

1. Aruino Duemilanove
2. Ethernet Shield
3. a small proto board (Radio Shack)
4. project enclosure (Radio Shack)
5. PCB-mount 9-pin D-sub-miniature connector
6. 6 resistors (5 22kOhm for TTL pins, 1 560 Ohm for the power LED)

Currently, this is *very* primitive. There is no acknowledgment of a correct or incorrect command. Also, after powering up the system from the USB connection, you have to hit the reset button or the network connection won't work. I understand this may be common to the Ethernet shield.

On the other hand, it seems to work very well.

If you're a geek, read the full post here.