Been a while...

It's been a while since I posted anything, but I finally have made some progress with the Arduino.

Since I'm building my own board eventually for the railroad signals I'm planning, I wanted to prototype a bare-bones Arduino from the ground up... I ordered a '168 from SparkFun, preloaded with the bootloader and then used the schematic and pinouts from Arduino.cc to build a minimal setup.

I built a small carrier board to put my resonator on for a good connection, wired it up to a 10mm jumbo LED, got the FTDI USB->Serial board connected and while it didn't work the FIRST time (It took a little tinkering) -- I finally uploaded a sketch and it works as expected - which is no simple feat for me right now for the amount of time I have of late...

After I got the Hello Blinky LED sketch running, I did tinker around with a sketch to set the brightness of the LED based on values from the serial port and that worked, too!

At any rate, progress in the forward direction!

/*
  DimmerTest
 
  Based on Examples, sets the LED brightness based on a numeric value received by the
  serial port.

 */

const int ledPin = 9;      // the pin that the LED is attached to

void setup()
{
  // initialize the serial communication:
  Serial.begin(9600);
  // initialize the ledPin as an output:
  pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
}

void loop() {
  byte brightness;
  byte character;

  // check if data has been sent from the computer:
  if (Serial.available()) {
    // read the most recent byte (which will be from 0 to 255):
    character = Serial.read();

    // check to see if the character is a ASCII Number between 0 and 9   
    if (character >= 48 && character <=57)
    {
      // fix the ASCII value to match the actual value
      // i.e. 0 = 0, 9 = 9
      character = character - 48;
      // scale the input values to light the LED. 
      //  chose scale value is 28
      //  i.e. 1*28 = 28, 9*28 = 252 (almost 255, close enough for this)
      brightness = character * 28;
    }   

    // set the LED's brightness:
    analogWrite(ledPin, brightness);
  }
}