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Most hobbyists start off with a cheap and nasty soldering iron which takes minutes to heat up, and provides no temperature control. Whilst a decent soldering station is a significant upgrade from a typical beginners iron, the cost can be prohibitive. Thankfully, GreatScottLab has put together a great instructable detailing how you can build your own fully controllable soldering station.

Not only is building your own significantly cheaper than buying a soldering station, but the process of building the electronics and 3D printing the enclosure provides a fantastic educational opportunity! To find out more about how you can get started building your own soldering station checkout the following link.  

Have you been reading about cool projects like this and would like to understand more? Checkout our Experimenter's Kit for Arduino:

The package includes a wide variety of parts, sensors and modules including: a servo motor, lights, buttons, switches, sound, sensors, breadboard, wires and more. Furthermore a Freetronics Eleven Arduino-compatible board is included to make this an extensive hobby experimenter, inventor and starter kit. The kit also includes a great project and instruction booklet, plus access to a supporting web page and software examples. To get started or for more information and to order, checkout the product page.

Already working on  a project you want us to feature in this blog? Let us know in the comments section below or on Facebook and Twitter.  

It was great to chat with fellow electronics enthusiasts at last night's The Amp Hour meetup in Melbourne!

Even more exciting was the projects that many people brought along for a bit of show and tell. One of the great projects that we spotted was Ian Tubman’s table usage monitor. The monitor is designed to detect when a table is in use using a shock detector and to wirelessly transmit this data back to a Freetronics Leostick. Ian plans to develop this into a more comprehensive system which can provide information about meeting room usage and availability for large companies. Great to see the Leostick being used for such an interesting project! If you want to discuss the project with Ian he can been reached on twitter.

If you are looking to get started making your own custom Arduino projects, why not check out our own ProtoShield for Arduino. The ProtoShield is an excellent tool to turn your temporary, breadboarded project into something more permanent. Proto Shield fits directly onto an Arduino board and has a large general purpose area in the middle where you can solder on your own parts to create a durable, long lasting project! The ProtoShield is a high quality, corrosion resistant gold plated PCB and represents great value at only $3!

Happy Easter from the team at Freetronics! Decorating eggs is a great Easter tradition.  Curtis Swartley has built a great random easter egg decorator. The project uses servos and a stepper motor controlled by a number of Arduino boards which control the spin of the egg and the position of the drawing pen. If you want to make your own decorator or see it in action checkout the following link.

 When you use motors in an Arduino project you will almost certainly need a H-Bridge motor driver. A H-Bridge allows you to easily control the direction of your motors from within your code. Our own Dual Channel H-Bridge Motor Driver Shield is a perfect solution to this problem, allowing you to drive two DC motors or a stepper motor.

The Dual Channel H-Bridge Motor Driver Shield features PWM control, selectable current limits and a prototyping area to add your own parts. To find out more check out the Dual Channel H-Bridge Motor Driver Shield page.

To keep up to date with the latest news, projects, product announcements and to let us know what you think of this project follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

This week on Skill Sunday we will be exploring EEPROM, an unheralded but extremely useful feature of Arduino boards. EEPROM stands for Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory and is a form of memory that can remember things even when the power is turned off or the Arduino is reset. If you take a look at the specifications for our Arduino compatible boards you will see an entry for EEPROM, for example, the EtherMega shown below has 4KB of EEPROM.  

The main benefit of this kind of memory is that it can be used to store data generated in a sketch on a more permanent basis. Typically EEPROM is used to store configuration parameters or serial numbers, although it can also be useful for storing regularly updating information such as the number of times the Arduino has been reset or cumulative measurements such as total distance travelled. To learn more about how you can put the EEPROM in your Arduino to use, checkout this great tutorial from tronixstuff.

The EtherMega is a great “fully-loaded” Arduino-compatible board. Apart from being completely Arduino Mega2560-compatible, it includes a full Ethernet interface, a microSD card socket, full USB interface, optional Power-over-Ethernet support and still has a circuit prototyping area with extra I2C interface pins. So if your project is breaking the limits, upgrade to the EtherMega today.

To keep up to date with the latest news, projects, product announcements  and to let us know what you think of this project follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Getting started with Arduino and electronics can be quite a daunting but highly rewarding task. Fortunately there are an abundance of fantastic resources available online to help get you started. 

Notably one of our re sellers, Core Electronics has just released a free, comprehensive Arduino Workshop for Beginners which is a great tool to help get you started. The workshop is comprised of a video series which covers the everything from "what is Arduino" to specifics such as how you can use SPI, I2C, EEPROM or interrupts in your projects. You can view the first video in the series below:

If you have been wanting to get started with Arduino our Experimenter's Kit for Arduino provides some great hardware and project guides to get you started:

The package includes a wide variety of parts, sensors and modules including: a servo motor, lights, buttons, switches, sound, sensors, breadboard, wires and more. Furthermore, a Freetronics Eleven Arduino-compatible board is included to make this an extensive hobby experimenter, inventor and starter kit. The kit also includes a great project and instruction booklet, plus access to a supporting web page and software examples. To get started or for more information, and to place a pre-order for our next batch of kits, checkout the product page.

What did you think of this week's Skill Sunday? Let us know in the comments section below or on Facebook and Twitter.   

It is easy to imagine that incorporating a camera into an Arduino project would be far too advanced for the average hobbyist! However, with the advent of many low cost and easy to use camera sensor modules such as the OV7670, the barrier of entry has been significantly lowered. Mybotic has put together a great instructable explaining how you can wire up the OC7670 camera to your Arduino, and set it up to take photos which are loaded straight onto your computer using the Arduino serial port. To find out more check out the following link.

If you are looking to get started making your own custom Arduino projects, why not check out our ProtoShield for Arduino. The ProtoShield is an excellent tool to turn your temporary, breadboarded project into something more permanent. ProtoShield's fit directly onto an Arduino board and have a large general purpose area in the middle where you can solder on your own parts to create a durable, long lasting project! The ProtoShield is a high quality, corrosion resistant gold plated PCB and represents great value at only $3!

To find out more about our fantastic ProtoShield’s check out our full collection at the following page. Found this week's Skill Sunday useful? Let us know in the comments section below or on Facebook and Twitter.   

Darts can be a great game, although if you aren’t very good it can be very frustrating! In an attempt to solve this “problem” former NASA engineer Rober has spent three years designing a building a motion tracking dart board which automatically moves as the dart is being thrown to ensure you hit the bulls eye with every shot. One of the critical elements of this system is an Arduino compatible board which helps to control the motors to realign the dart board! Although this creation is a little over engineered it is way too cool not to share!

When you use motors in an Arduino project you will almost certainly need a H-Bridge motor driver. A H-Bridge allows you to easily control the direction of your motors from within your code. Our own Dual Channel H-Bridge Motor Driver Shield is a perfect solution to this problem, allowing you to drive two DC motors or a stepper motor.

The Dual Channel H-Bridge Motor Driver Shield features PWM control, selectable current limits and a prototyping area to add your own parts. To find out more check out the Dual Channel H-Bridge Motor Driver Shield page.

For fans of LED cubes, there's now a brand new cube specialist here in Australia. With a background in the music industry, the founders of LightcubeZ saw demand for visual displays at clubs and other music venues, and turned to the Freetronics RGB LED Cube as a building block for creating cool light shows.

Check out their new site at lightcubez.com.au.

The ESP8266 is an extremely popular, low cost WiFi module which is widely used in DIY hardware hacking community.

The module provides one of the easiest ways to add WiFi to an Arduino project and as a result of it’s popularity there is a plenty of help available online if you get stuck! Whilst the ESP8266 can be used in combination with an Arduino, you can also use it as a stand alone microcontroller. Fortunately programming the ESP8266 as a stand alone board is quite straightforward and is even possible through the existing Arduino IDE. To find out more about how you can do program your ESP8266, checkout the following tutorial.  

Have you been reading about cool projects like this and would like to understand more? Checkout our Experimenter's Kit for Arduino:

The package includes a wide variety of parts, sensors and modules including: a servo motor, lights, buttons, switches, sound, sensors, breadboard, wires and more. Furthermore, a Freetronics Eleven Arduino-compatible board is included to make this an extensive hobby experimenter, inventor and starter kit. The kit also includes a great project and instruction booklet, plus access to a supporting web page and software examples. To get started or for more information, and to place a pre-order for our next batch of kits, checkout the product page.

What did you think of this week's Skill Sunday? Let us know in the comments section below or on Facebook and Twitter.

Although Arduino boards are typically quite robust, things can still go wrong, especially when used by total beginners. One of the most catastrophic problems that can occur is totally burning out the ATmega microcontroller which is the brains of most Arduino boards. Fortunately this scenario doesn’t have to mean the end for your Arduino board and can actually represent a fantastic learning opportunity! With this tutorial from make you can learn how to replace a burnt-out ATmega in your Arduino board and upload the bootloader using an AVR ISP programmer, so that the new ATmega functions just like an Arduino. This sure beats purchasing an entirely new board!

If you are looking for an ICSP AVR programmer look no further than our USBasp! The programmer has a USB interface and allows you to program bootloaders or firmware on a wide range of microcontrollers including the ATmega which is used in Arduino boards. To find out more and to order checkout the following link.