Danger Shield! Will Robinson!

So I finally received my parts from SeeedStudio .... that took a while, one reason was that I ordered on the 29th of December and they were closed till the 4th and then the package sat at HongKong Post for 7 frikking days! In any case, it left on the 11th and I got the lil box O goodies on the 15th, just in time for the weekend! woo hoo!

Here is a picture of the stuff. I got a half dozen shift registers, a couple Maxim Led drivers, a bunch of led matrix (red only) and some bar graph 10 segment LED's ... the idea floating around in my head is to somehow create a Server monitoring display dashboard thingy which will use blinky lights to warn of impending danger (or disk space outage or cpu overload etc... but we'll see).

And here is Le Stash!



First order of business, of course, was to assemble and solder the "Danger Shield" by Zak "Hoeken" Smith (of the CupCake/MakerBot and Sanguino fame).

Headers go on first.



Some time passes as we inhale the solder and flux fumes... the makeshift "fume extractor" fan distributes the fumes evenly throughout the enclosed workspace ... we marvel at the quality of our first time solder joints ...



... and eh VOILA!!!



I did try to download the "firmwares" (as Z.Hoken calls the sketches on his page) from the sourceforge repository, but I found that they don't work with Arduino-0017 and give weird errors.

Finally, I found, through my friend Google, link to a discussion which mentions the fix (or hack... or ugly kludge or whatever) which is to put the magical incantation of #include "WProgram.h" at the top of your _init.h file.

I put this in the beginning of my sketch (not the _init.h file, but before the include that .. ahem, includes the _init.h file.

In any case, the problem has existed since arduino-0012 ... but seems to have been on the back burner ... whatever.

UPDATE: The "knock sensor" doesn't really work ... I think it is brokeded! :-<