Arduino

off.the.walls

Hey everyone,

have a few cool ideas and want to mess about with arduino products, was wondering does anyone know some good hardware stores in order to buy things such as lcd displays and scanners for either retina or fingerprints?

Thanks

syklops

Get everything online. The only brick and mortar shop I know of is Maplin and they will roger you price wise.

DublinDilbert

The arduino is not really powerful enough to run a full biometrics algorithm itself. So the sensors you connect might have to have some processing on board. For to run a biometric algorithm you'd be looking at an arm processor.

witnessmenow

I agree, a Pi zero would be more what you are looking for here

ozmo

off.the.walls wrote: »

Hey everyone,

have a few cool ideas and want to mess about with arduino products, was wondering does anyone know some good hardware stores in order to buy things such as lcd displays and scanners for either retina or fingerprints?

Thanks

I've used many sensors, devices and lcd displays with Arduino without issue -
They are very reliable little devices.

Here's a Fingerprint scanner + Arduino tutorial...

http://www.instructables.com/id/fingerprint-arduino-with-16x2-LCD/
http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Fingerprint-Lock/
(You can get the modules on ebay/amazon.co.uk for 10 to 15 euros.)

A few things I found Arduino cannot do though include Face and Voice recognition - anything that requires a lot of memory - those are best left to RPi/Android/Edison etc.

eeguy

Farnell for EVERYTHING!!

Jimmy_The_One

Hi Off.The.Walls,

1: Farnell defo. Maplin, as the man said, will roger you on price, and RS want to sell you packs of 100.

2: Arduino? I bought an UNO and have spent the last 4 weeks trying to find ANY example sketches on the web that would actually run on it, i.e. produce changes in pin voltages I could see with a scope. If it hadn't been for one or two that DID run, I'd have thought my Arduino was broken.

The trouble is, there is a HUGE amount of crap out there, you have to search very well to find anything useful. There are "libraries" by the ton but not a lot to tell you what they actually do.

Best thing is to buy a good book & start from scratch. You'll be lucky to find working fingerprint sketches, I think.

And the forums are a total mess, with stuff turning up right left and centre that have nothing to do with the thread title.

Go for a micro that has web support you can understand, and a decently organised forum. Not Arduino.

witnessmenow

I'm not sure arduino can adjust pin voltages? I think the only thing it can do for that say dimming an LED would be PWM, which should be straight forward enough. One thing to be careful about is that PWM is only supported on some UNO pins.

Capt'n Midnight

eeguy wrote: »

Farnell for EVERYTHING!!

I use http://cpcireland.farnell.com/ before http://ie.farnell.com/

ozmo

Farnell and RS if its a paid job-
But a very good source of Arduino parts for the hobbiest to condider is adverts.ie
There are several people there who sell brand new components in small quantities there for a fifth or more of the big stores...

ozmo

Jimmy_The_One wrote: »

I bought an UNO and have spent the last 4 weeks trying to find ANY example sketches on the web that would actually run on it, .

Hi, if you want to send me details I might be able assist- ive managed to get some good stuff working on all the Arduinos (unos, nanos) and varients and clones(Eg the Intel Edison and Galielo boards, Photon and Esp modules) Ive worked with so far.
They are very robust and flexible devices.

gooch2k9

witnessmenow wrote: »

I'm not sure arduino can adjust pin voltages? I think the only thing it can do for that say dimming an LED would be PWM, which should be straight forward enough. One thing to be careful about is that PWM is only supported on some UNO pins.

It wouldn't be able to unless the micro has a built in DAC, which I would think is unlikely. Just had a look there, cheap enough I2C DAC shields available, they'd do the job. As you say though, PWM would be the preferred option.

Keplar240B

There's a small business on adverts.ie in Santry, I believe you can collect from them just type in arduiono and you see 80% of the stuff is being sold by him, hundreds of electronic parts.

eeguy

Keplar240B wrote: »

There's a small business on adverts.ie in Santry, I believe you can collect from them just type in arduiono and you see 80% of the stuff is being sold by him, hundreds of electronic parts.

Estmx is the seller name. He's based up in Northwood.

His stuff is all Chinese copies, but super cheap and without the 4 week waiting time.

BrianG23

Ebay has some cheap as chips(the potato kind) parts, ADCs etc. They can take a while to get here though so buy in bulk. If you're using a standard Uno you can do much processing, maybe buy the new arudino 101? 25-30 quid and has a bit of power behind it albeit again not so much. BLE on board and a gyro/accel though.

I've found arduino incredibly easy to use Jimmy...if you want tips on specific things just ask. Pwm is the way to go for pin voltages too. You can see PWM avaible pins on the side i'll be ~d9 or whatever, so long as the pin has ~ beside it or else just check the spec sheet

Keplar240B

another one hitechworld_trading on ebay are based in Dublin not sure if they have a real world presence or what
great prices there, tons of electronics parts.
http://www.ebay.ie/usr/hitechworld_trading?_trksid=p2047675.l2559

Any good uk based stores or other irish ones i don't know about?