I've red the "How to make a breadboard arduino" and I am sure what I need is close to that but since mine will be battery driven (and I know just a bit of electronics) can someone please tell me what I should connect to get 5-10 leds and 1-2 speakers working on a battery and on an switch (the movement to open the card).
Thank you in advance
PS. I am thinking of programing this on my arduino and then remove the atMega to use it in the card and replace the atmega with a new one... is this the "correct" approach?
Personally I prefer to use a program header. That is just 5 pins that I then connect to a USB ? serial (TTL) converter. Then you can do the programming "in circuit". It saves pulling things in and out of sockets.
Many of my projects are stand alone, some have two versions, arduino and stand alone, like this one:- http://www.thebox.myzen.co.uk/Hardware/Pendulum.html
Simpson : I've almost finished writting the code... that's the easy part for me! It's the board schematic I need help with... for example... do I need a voltage regulator? Should I use a 3.3V battery? Will the energy be enough for the led and the speakers? Do I need a resonator or not? All standalones I've seen use power adapters and not batteries.
Mike : I had seen this awesome project before! Way to go man! I've downloaded the schematics and the 3rd one seems interesting...
If you stay below 5.5 volts a regulator only uses energy. Most Atmel-controllers can work with a lot less, but you should check the data-sheet to know what yours... is capable of.
With much lower voltages you'll have problems driving other leds as red ones, but 3.3 volts should be enough to drive speaker and every colour led.
You don't really need an resonator, but it is probably quite useful when you write your programs on an arduino with resonator. I haven't tried it using the arduino-environment yet, did with Bascom, getting the internal resonator to work/change it back can be tricky. I'd certainly read a number of threads on that.
I wouldn't worry about power usage, it's hard to say whether AA-batteries will power the project for more as a week continually, but I guess... they'll be up to it. They'll of course last shorter, but you could even use coin-cells if you wanted to.
By setting the resonator (int/ext) to a low speed and using sleep modes in your programming you could extend that time much further. I'm still too much between programming environments to tell you much about the Arduino way of doing that, haven't played with it yet.
