Arduino Capabilities?

im looking at the arduino for a project at the moment. now the basics version of the project is to take information from sensors in and control various circuits accordingly.

however, down the track id like to add in memory and an lcd so i can log and display sensor information. is this within the arduino's capabilities?

Well, details on the bits help to tell you for sure, but the basic stuff you're talking about are all definitly possible.

Check around in the playground and the tutorials to find examples of basically everything you've said, and then you just piece it all together!

But all that aside, an arduino is a quality investment for any electronics and project hobbyist, so why not eh?

One of the really cool things about Arduino is the fact that so many people have used it for so many different procejts now, that almost no matter what your project is, the chance is that someone has alredy done something similar, and documented it somewhere online.

In your case the only (sligthly) difficult thing is adding more memory, but other people have interfaced Arduino to SD memory cards for added memory. So you should be safe.

Yes, all those things are common things for the Arduino. Projects beyond it's reach tend to be those things requiring very high speed processing and of course code that has to fit within 16K, however there is alternate AVR chips that can now increase program size to 32 and 64K. Even those tasks that can't be handled directly with the Arduino can often be accomblished with support modules that then communicate with the Arduino using I2C, SPI or serial paths.

Jump on in, the waters fine

Lefty

So, how much more of an endorsement do you need?

By the way, there's a bunch of built in EEPROM memory that you can use for logging or whatever you need. It should be fairly plentiful for all but the most demanding tasks.