Trying out Arduino

I’ve had a few false starts when it comes to the control system of the BatBerry.  First I was looking at the Fusion Brain as the system that would run my relays.  However, this was only going to be able to use USB and I wanted a wireless option that could be used both with my BlackBerry smartphone and PlayBook.

Then I bought a Bluetooth to serial converter so that I could use a serial National Control device to run the relays.  I’ve been putting of getting one of these control devices because they’re fairly pricey.

Recently I was over in Sweden visiting the folks from TAT and they have been doing a bunch of work with Arduino which is an open source hardware platform.  I was lucky enough to have one of the guys there give me a Bluetooth Arduino board that he was no longer using.  I’m thinking this will be the controller brains behind the BatBerry.

I’ve already bought a bunch of SPDT automotive relays and jumper wires that I’ll be using with the board.  Next I’ll be writing the microcontroller code to accept my commands via Bluetooth.

My first task will be combining two SPDT relays together to act as a reverse polarity switch to pop up/down the 30cals 🙂