Inspiration

As I said in my previous post, I wanted to keep electronics as a hobby, but somehow I never managed to do anything.

Part of the reason for this was due to a lack of time - work takes up far to much time and partying is also quite time consuming! Probably the biggest problem though was the lack of a great idea that really inspired me to start a project.

I have toyed with the idea of starting a Microchip PIC project many times. The PIC always looked like a decent platform for cheap home development projects, but somehow the PIC processor didn't really inspire me - I'm very much used to programming Motorola based CPU's and the PIC seems to be more in line with the Intel way of doing things, which for a Motorola fan is not a good thing ;-)

If I had a great idea for a project, then I would have had the inspiration to start a PIC project, but the hardware itself wasn't enough to inspire me into thinking of a project that I wanted to do!

Last weekend, I was visiting a friend in Zurich and he was playing around with an Arduino board. This little thing looked really nice. It features an Atmel ATmega168 processor - I'm familiar with Atmel from my day to day job, but the ATmega168 was a new platform to me. After a brief look at the spec sheet for this processor, it was clear that this little 8-bit processor is quite similar in its architecture and way of doing things to the Motorola processors that I'm more familiar with.

Suddenly I'd found a piece of kit that I really wanted to play with. With the inspiration for the hardware, coming up with an idea for a project was just a matter of time....