EDC Update

I decided after carrying a rucksack around as my edc that it was really not practical on a day today basis. I have now placed the options in the car, more on that in another video.

Instead I have devised a more compact solution that i can just pick up and go with.

My choice of microcontroller

At this point in time there are a shed load of options for picking a microcontroller development board. I had 3 criteria when I was looking to pick my first controller board

1   ease of use

I wanted something that was easy to program and offered a good variety of ports and pins and would give me some flexibility in expanding it for future projects.I love to protoype and the ability to swap and change configurations of hardware and software is really important to me.

2   support

support is very important. I like support were the provider of the device are approachable and have a good community to ask questions to and get examples and tutorials.

3. Price

I'm not rich and I needed something that I could maybe buy multiples quickly of the device quickly and cheaply.

The choice i was considering was between a raspberry Pi, Arduino and Basic Stamp. I discounted the basic stamp almost straight away as it is expensive to get a basic setup going and the bsic stamp is very underpowered when compared to my other choices. The Rasperry Pi is a highly powerful device but what made me bend towards the arduino was the large number of addon boards (called shields) available. For me the Arduino platform is the best I have found if you are an eternal tinkerer.


I love my Arduino it comes in my top the favourite things (the other 2 been the wife and kids and my dremel ).

I started by buying an Arduino Diecimila. this i use for prototyping. I have recently purchased a Arduino Nano. This has a really small footprint and is designed to plug into a breadboard.If i ever get past the tinkering stage i will use the nano as my distribution board. 

Specs for my arduinos are as follows:

Arduino Diecimila

Microcontroller    ATmega168
Operating Voltage    5V
Input Voltage (recommended)    7-12 V
Input Voltage (limits)    6-20 V
Digital I/O Pins    14 (of which 6 provide PWM output)
Analog Input Pins    6
DC Current per I/O Pin    40 mA
DC Current for 3.3V Pin    50 mA
Flash Memory    16 KB (of which 2 KB used by bootloader)
SRAM    1 KB
EEPROM    512 bytes
Clock Speed    16 MHz

Arduino Nano

Microcontroller    Atmel ATmega328
Operating Voltage (logic level)    5 V
Input Voltage (recommended)    7-12 V
Input Voltage (limits)    6-20 V
Digital I/O Pins    14 (of which 6 provide PWM output)
Analog Input Pins    8
DC Current per I/O Pin    40 mA
Flash Memory    16 KB (ATmega168) or 32 KB (ATmega328) of which 2 KB used by bootloader
SRAM     2 KB (ATmega328)
EEPROM    512 bytes (ATmega168) or 1 KB (ATmega328)
Clock Speed    16 MHz
Dimensions    0.73" x 1.70"

If you want to find out more about the Arduino platform go to the main webpage at  http://arduino.cc/