Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Projects with Ryan Slaugh: Getting Started with Arduinio Mini and FTDI”.
There’S lots of options when it comes to arduinos. Two of the most common, of course, are the leonardo and the uno roughly the same size. They both use usb connectors have a lot of header space, but sometimes you need something a little smaller than even the leonardo or the uno. That’S why you have the mini, as the name might imply. The mini is a tiny version of the arduino. Now this board doesn’t have a usb connector, but it does have a header for connecting all the digital i o and analog input to connect to it. You need to use an ftdi friend this converts usb to serial and in this project, i’m going to show you how to put it all together, a great resource in learning how to use the ftdi friend is from adafruit learning system that can be found here. However, if you have the most updated arduino software chances are all the drivers are already on your system, just plug in the board into your usb, and the system will acknowledge that it sees it and load the driver. Once the driver has been installed, your computer will assign a serial port to the ftdi friend, depending on what os you’re using there’s different ways to find out what com port it was assigned to i’m using windows here.
So i can look through the device manager and see that it was assigned to com15 if you’re using mac or linux, you can go through the terminal and issue a command that will tell you where it was assigned to get started. I’Ll put the arduino mini into my trusty breadboard here to power. This i’m going to be using a 9-volt box that i got from maker shed simple box with just two wires, but it actually has a switch on it as well, which makes it really handy for using in simple projects i’ll install the ftdi friend into the breadboard. As well now, i’m installing it up on end here i did have a little cable strain relief to make sure it didn’t bend the pins back.
Then i connect the friend to the arduino. Only three connections are needed: rx, tx and ground make sure to swap the rx and tx the schematic provided will show everything to go on to the next step of the project. I added the led we’re going to say the hello world and hardware with blinking led, so i install that on pin 13 with a series resistor to get started from arduino. I select the board as the mini with 328 and select the proper serial com. Now we have successfully gotten the blinky program to start running blinking our led now, when you do the compile and upload from the arduino program. There’S timing involved with this reset button. After you start the compile and upload sequence when it starts saying uploading code, that’s when you want to press that reset button. Otherwise, the mini and your arduino program will not be synced up together in order to upload the sketch, while blinking an led is a good start.
I want to do a little more, so i’m going to use this touch sensor that actually acts as a 10k potentiometer and light up a row of leds. Depending on where the position of the potentiometer is so i’ll wire up 10 leds, then i will wire up 10 series resistors one from each port into the led. I use a 330 ohm series resistor just to limit the current a little bit once that’s all done. I can wire it all up, putting the i o into individual leds from there i’ll wire the touch sensor onto the side of the breadboard just bend the pins down to let it lay flat three wire connection: five volts ground and the center pin going to analog Input zero.
Once i upload the sketch, i can control the leds with a swipe of my finger. So now you can use the arduino mini in any of your projects. The mini is really well suited due to its size for, of course, smaller projects, as well as those projects that you need more room for other things. Besides, the control it’ll find a home in some of my projects that will be headed to the outdoors happy building. You .