Welcome!

We're delighted to welcome you to the new Embedded Adventures website.  What you see here is, we hope, the start of many fascinating adventures into the world of embedded electronics.  You'll find an increasing range of tutorials as well as news about new products and what's happening in the industry.  You'll also discover a small but growing range of products designed to give you new skills, solve problems and most of all, make fun things yourself. 

At Embedded Adventures, we firmly believe you can never have enough flashing lights.  So with that in mind we're starting with some excellent value LED Display Panels that you can use for text display, clocks, twitter messages, games, or just about anything else.  We've worked with our manufacturing partners to bring you a good balance between size, resolution and cost.  The range will grow over the next few weeks too, so check back to see the latest.

Of course, you'll need a platform designed to drive the panels - so we've designed a board specifically to handle the refresh of these displays. The PLT-1001 is packed with a Microchip PIC18F2620, temperature sensor and real time clock, so you've always got something to display.  Not only that, but it has space for a device that reveals another area we think you can't have enough of.  The MRF24J40MB is an IEEE 802.15.4 module that makes it easy to establish reliable communication between devices.  We'll be covering this module it in depth in upcoming tutorials, including building a complete wireless mesh network.  Of course, you don't actually need to connect the PLT-1001 to a LED display - you can just use it as a basis for learning about 802.15.4 wireless networks if you wish.

Speaking of wireless networks, the PLT-1002 is a great platform for exploring.  Not only does it have an PIC18F25K20 running at 16mips, it has enough LED indicators to let you know what's going on, space for an MRF24J40MB module and all unused pins broken out for your own nefarious purposes.

The PLT-1001 and PLT-1002 come as kits that require soldering.  There's some surface mount soldering, but only for chips large enough to make it quite straightforward.  We think you'll enjoy making them and putting them to use.

Embedded Adventures started out as a blog writing down what we learnt about embedded electronics and sharing discoveries.  We're continuing that tradition on our new website by completely revising all the tutorials we've done and bringing them up to date.  Check back soon for new tutorials as we get them polished up.  Part of this was providing full source code - the famous PicPack library, which now in version 3 contains a bewildering array of supported devices, including graphics routines and USB support.

We hope this gives you a taste of the things we'll be doing here at Embedded Adventures.  We have an exciting range of new products, kits and modules in the pipeline and hope that you'll get the same joy from making things with embedded electronics as we have.

Ian Harris
June 2010