I am looking for a board that will permit a "Arduino Mega 2560" and any standard/mega shield to be plugged into it, with the relevant connections, switch/link selectable.

Does anyone know of such a board?

http://store.arduino.cc/ww/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=11&products_id=22

This has probably been covered a million times, but i'll ask anyways.

Indeed.  Although using your topic title as the search only finds around 400,000 pages on Google.

https://www.google.com/search?q=soldering+for+beginners

Hakko FX-888  Good Price... Excellent Tool.

Agreed.  I moved to the FX-888 recently.  The color scheme is silly but the iron works very well for the price.

My old analog multimeter broke this morning so does anyone know of a website that sells used digital multimeters.

www.ebay.com

I have no idea how to implement ic2. do you have a quick down and dirty schematic / code example? also this wouldn't interfere with the signal transmission?

I'd worry more about interfering with the controlled impedance of the VGA's signal lines than the relatively slow I2C bus. You don't have to actively participate, just watch for the data or clock signal to toggle.  That will tell you the monitor is trying to talk to the projector.

Use Ustream?

Don't bother with the VGA signals, which are 75ohm paths.   Pins 12 and 15 are i2c pins.  You could just watch for activity on those lines.

http://pinouts.ru/all/VGA15_pinout.shtml

Thanks.  Missed it by searching for "bootloader" instead of "boot loader". (I didn't look at the TOC either, which would have shortened the search.)

(As a side note, can the Arduino be coded with VHDL? I've barely studied the stuff, but it'll be on my final exam and it'd be great to mess with it at home on my own hardware)

No, VHDL is a hardware description language.  The Arduino is a microcontroller which is a set hardware implementation. 

In theory, you could use VHDL to describe the ATmega328s hardware, but you would still need to write software to do anything with it.  (this is how ARM processors get embedded into ASICs and FPGAs).

Often the answer to huge variable constants is moving them to PROGMEM.  Sometimes people then ask if they can modify the data at runtime.  Ignoring for just a moment if this should be done, I have wondered what is the bootloader doing (or enabling) at allows it to write to PROGMEM that other running programs can't?

No, the running program cannot write to PROGMEM.

You might want to look into an external RAM or EEPROM chip.

Both.

 

SInce this subject never comes up and google doesn't have any results either, let me add that I've been using Seeedstudio since year 2009. Very happy with the quality of the boards, options, and price. They only test 5 of the 10 boards, but I have yet to find a failed one.

My only dislike is all boards have to be retangular. Some services will route shapes for you, Seeed does not.

I'm also thinking: How do car manufacturers do it? They have heaps of crap running that probably utilises 5V..  Clocks, radios, etc.  - Voltage regulator to reduce to 5V - but then these continually waste power through the drop.

Heaps?  Look at the size of your car battery and then look at the size of a AA.  Notice a difference?

Leave a car sitting for 2 or 3 weeks, it probably won't start.

A good start is to post the code you have now. State what works, and what doesn't.  In describing what doesnt it is useful to explain what happened versus what you expected.

That said, why are you using the analog inputs to read a high or low?  That sounds very digital.

What is your USB TTL programmer?