Hello all,
I want to make dmmer for my aquarium working as moon light. I read a lot regarding Arduino board and i ma little confused.. is there any post with more specific information regarding the hardware requirements?
Thanks in advance
Hi Takis
I'm new to this as well (don't actually have an Arduino yet) but I've spent ages and ages looking through this site at all the information. I've got an OK background in electronics and have done a lot of OO programming, so a lot of it was fairly intuitive to me.
I started by reading the hardware page for the Duemilanove, then looking at wikipedia for things like finding out what I2C, SPI, etc is. I looked through the reference and code examples, then spent a long time looking through the playground at various shields and hardware interfaces that had been written about.
Reading and understanding is the only way. Start from this site, visit every page and read around programming and electronics if your background isn't that strong.
I still don't understand pull ups and pull downs!!
I'm also looking at this topic, as far as I can tell, LEDs are strange creatures.
I would point you to an already done implementation at: http://www.chestersgarage.com/documentation/power-led-shield
You could use one of the PWM pins, and then use a TIP120 to drive the leds.
If I should make this, I would feed the arduino board with 12V through the extra power connector, and also feed the TIP120 with the same 12V, then add the needed resistor to each led.
Whilst humans are not too worried by 500Hz flicker (except for very rapid movement), has anyone found out if fish are similarly unaffected?
Well.. I've taken a look at a T5 ballast and the frequency specs are 60-110 kHz, they call this High Frequency Electronic Ballast.
Check here for an LED project for reef aquariums using the arduino/avr.