Arduino questions

[EMAIL HIDDEN]

Jay,

> Mostly in the programmability and expansion -Diecimila has everything
> you need onboard to do programming and such, whereas the minidev
> requires a fair bit of wire twiddling to get started.  Out of the box
> the Diecimila is ready to go ..

I was thinking that too, if I'm away with work, I can take my macbook and
this and do some hacking.

> Yup.  On the Diecimila you just pop out the old chip and put in the
> new one.

ok, the one I've ordered claims it comes with the mega168 already, fingers
crossed.

> Have a look at the stuff we did (well mostly Marius, I just answered
> his intelligent questions) on Friday:

I spotted that and had a look, looks fairly straight forward, I was
slightly confused about the serial ports.

> Yes you can use the UART for this - the only issue is it makes
> debugging a bit difficult, because normally the UART is used as serial
> console, though Marius has done a cute hack to add logging ..

ok, the devices TX is connected to the TX pin and the RX of the FTDI chip,
this means anything going 'out' of the arduino is also sent to the USB
interface. Correct?
Looking at the schematic, that's what the 1K resistors (R9 and R10) are
for, to stop the USB -> serial device interfearing with the users own
serial devices.

> Dunno what you mean by this, but the Arduino kit comes with avr-gcc
> and it just outputs compiled code to the board, which runs natively.
> I dunno where you're getting an interpreter out of all this, maybe
> this is a misunderstanding?

ahh, cool, yes it was a misunderstanding.
This leads to a question, what's the boot loader on the arduino for?
When you program the chip does it just run the program in RAM (I can't see
how, it'd have to be tiny) or does it overwrite the bootloader already in
the chip.
OR, does the arduino programmer software use the bootloader to do in
circuit self programing?

Sorry for the potentially dumb-ass questions

Paul