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Arduino Adventures :: Day 1

The encryption is coming along very well. All the key generation, and calculation and actual encryption/decryption is 100% done and working, and I have over come most of the hurdles in rendering it all. But as my project A.D.D. dictates, I'm taking a break for a little bit, to do some electronics stuff...

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I've had an interest in electronics projects ever since I was little when I had one of those 300 in 1 Electronic Projects kits:

In recent years I've had a real hankering to get back into it and do a hardware project, but for one reason or another, all of my ideas for projects had some fatal flaw (cost, complexity, time, ect...) and none of them have ever gotten off the ground.

Thats why when I found the Arduino, I jumped at it, not even having a particular project in mind. It was a cheap micro-controller (about $30), both simple to assemble and use. Yet it had a huge open source community that produced tons of add-ons, so it was flexible.

I ended up spending about $80 to get the micro-controller, plus a book, wires, resistors, LEDs, Bread Board, and a few other odds and ends in this bundle which I can't recommend enough.

Now I had never actually soldered before (except for that one time in 8th grade when I tried to mod my Playstation. It didn't go well...) so I had to buy a Soldering Iron as well.

Now with everything I needed, I set to building the Arduino. All the hard, very tiny parts are already on, but there is still some assembly required 😉

I only soldered 10 pins tonight. A few of them came out ok, but many are Cold Solders: