My first Arduino Shield

I'm starting to think that I'm a bit obsessed with Arduino. Anyway, after several nights testing and reading about Arduino I found an interesting link to a Breadboard Shield Design. Just to keep in context I will say that Arduino solution, has also a nice way to be upgraded using shields, or I will say layers. The Arduino board is been designed to be able to connect boards on top of it where you can place your favorite components such us motor drivers, temperature sensors, etc...

Arduino + Servos

Since I received my brand new Arduino boards I´ve been migrating my electronics projects from PICAXE to Arduinio. The first step was to be able to control a servo using the Arduino board.

From PICAXE to Arduino

I´m done with PICAXE for several reasons:

• I´ve purchased a new laptop to replace my old computer and I realized that it has no serial ports, so I lost the way to program my PICAXE microcontrollers. (Yeap I can buy the USB cable, but that means to invert more money).
• There is no way to reuse the programming cable of the PICAXE to send/receive data from the PC. I usually need this feature when I play with microcontrollers and if I need two cables, one for programming and another to communicate, it sucks.
• Serial communication routines are pretty slow on PICAXE microcontrollers and the speeds supported aren´t too high.
• You need batteries to provide power to the PICAXE board, that sucks. I´m usually going to use the microcontroller as an interface to the world for my PC, so I would rather the PC to provide the power to the PICAXE board.