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The Arduino was never about price or performance. If you really want a led display, you can get fastly more powerfull and usuable device by simply buying a dedicated device. Same for a remote control robot, even programmable ones.

But with an Arduino even those NOT blessed with a background in electronics could make it work. There are even interfaces for it where you program it completely through a icon interface like this http://www.electronics-lab.com/blog/?p=5865

Yes, there are more powerful devices out there, there are cheapers devices there are even more powerful AND cheaper devices out there. And they ALL didn't succeed to even come close to the support Arduino had. Even if you have no programming experience and never messed around with a battery and a led, the Arduino community is able and willing to give you a hand.

It is the difference between Ubuntu and Debian, between Linux and BSD, between PHP and Python. Sure, the "experts" look down on it, but the first are the stuff that gets used by noobs who might or might not become experts (if they even have a desire too) while the second are the stuff people TELL you you must use before they even consider talking to you.

I know some people who never coded anything yet messed around with Arduino after buying a kit and did some silly little projects that won't amaze anyone bit it was fun for them, not unlike the electronic kits you could buy when I was a kid. Sure sure, if you all did it from scratch with a soldering iron, you no doubt ended up a much better kind of human being but us mere dregs had to make due with simpler tools. And get things done.

When it comes time for you to move on, as you outgrow the Arduino, you can go for the more specialist tools and hopefully overcome the lack of manuals and guides. But some people need the training wheels and sneering at them is only get you complete and utter contempt from all the non-pricks in this world.

Like I have utter contempt for a person who lists as an alternative a board that isn't available at the stated price anymore and another board that has a shipping time of anywhere from a week to a month depending on what the supplier feels like and neither has anywhere near the 3rd party support.

Let me know when I can give away an arduino kit and have someone make something immediatly even if it is as trivial as a led lighting up to a light sensor but THEY did it, themselves and get that makers spirit burning in another product that is both as forgiving AND as flexible, THEN you can come back.

No doubt people like taktoa scoff at childrens books too because for less you can buy great literature, in latin!

Yeah it seems those simple bar-displays per frequency I was calling "vu-meter" are also called "spectrum analysers", but it's exactly what you indicated on the link. Most old audio equipment does not use a FFT, but a series of filters (check http://www.electronics-lab.com/blog/?p=7057 , theirs is with nixie tubes, but the principle is the same). Modern mp3 players do not need much effort to reproduce a bar-based spectral analysis, because usually the file format is already encoded on the frequency domain.
Btw, when I think spectrum analyzers, I think of this kind of equipment: http://www.tek.com/spectrum-analyzer/rsa5000 .

Yeah, but what if they are all yellow? Also, The bomb game

From the POV of economic production, replacement, and being able to re-use old notebooks whose dead batteries turn them into throwaways, that's a good idea.

Not really. It would just be one more stupid bureaucratic idea that would impede progress to very little useful gain. You would end up freezing design at one level with no ability to change other than to get the law / administrative order changed. You do realize that most of the battery packs you complain about are really pretty standard under the shell - they are comprised of a few fairly standard cell types that are packed in varied configurations. There is a thriving aftermarket for battery pack replacements even for oddball electronics. Don't need no stinkin laws.

Deciding I needed a PWM for a project, I wanted to build my own to learn about electronics...so I went to radio shack and bought their $79.99 Electronics Learning Lab.(this kit alone is HOURS of amusement and learning)...but what I learned quickly is that following the Mimms book was very wasteful...the explanations of what is happening is scant...the diagrams are great, but blinking leds and making buzzer noises just ISN'T practical to a freshman in High School(I've taught them Freshman computing and mentored them in many aspects of I.T.)...

Below are some sites I've come across searching for 'simple enough for a basic solderer' and with readily available components(strip parts out of busted old computer power supplies/vcrs/radios/etc)..

http://www.electronics-lab.com/projects/audio/023/index.html

something fun and useful...a 'hearing aid' =) ... the entire site is useful

http://www.aaroncake.net/circuits/

some things more complex...

http://sci-toys.com/index.html

fun and educational .. some real easy stuff...and some more challenging stuff...

Hope this post ranks high enough for you to find it.

This one got me interested. Nothing is really documented after that. ive found various nokias ahve this and a similar color screen. very easy to interface. http://www.electronics-lab.com/projects/mcu/013/index.html

I highly recommend getting an Arduino board, either an USB or Bluetooth one. They're easily programmable, have 14 digital and 6 analog pins and are quite cheap.
A more advanced board would be this one which is available from Sparkfun (who happen to have all sorts of electronic parts). Comes with an LCD, included SD card reader, 3 axis accelerometer. Wonder if TinyOS runs on it, anyone?
There are lots of cool things that can be done with these boards, google for "arduino projects".
Some nice sites for the electronic geek:
Hackaday
Electronics Lab

Cheers!

BTW, here is the battery info. These are quite possibily what is inside of iphone or ipod. and they use internal batteries, not external.

Those are not batteries. Those are battery packs with enclosed circuitry. These are LI-ION batteries INSIDE of a pack. So, does the ipod and iphone use a battery, or a battery pack? I am guessing the former and they have the charger on the board.

Yeah. No doubt that the batteries are currently in the lead WRT to energy density. But that may change:

Running 31F at 3500V in 336 pounds gives them 350Wh/kg.
And for LI-ION: High energy density that reaches 400 Wh/L (volumetric energy density) or 160Wh/Kg (mass energy density).
Of course, the source has to be considered, but if the peswiki article is true, the capacitors is 2x better.

As to the discharge, yeah, that is an issue. The better super capacitors are losing something like 1% / day. But with the rapid charge/discharge rate, it is possible that this can be turned into an advantage. In particular, when you park at night, the car is plugged in and the power is drained for the house use. Late at night (say 2am when loads on the grid are low), the capacitor is recharged again.

Even in batteries, there are loads of applications where a small discharge is ok. If this is really double the capacity of li-ion, then it would be useful, for cameras (coming from a hot stand), mice, mpg players, or even emergency lamps plugged into the grid. Obviously, it will not be used for regular car batteries or even normal AA/C/D for something like a flashlight, stand alone cameras, etc.

I'm not sure if anybody's said it explicitly, but a hardware equivalent to SourceForge would be a great asset to the community, where people can share RTL, schematics, PCB and chip layouts, and so forth.

Try this

The problem is that the insides of CRTs aren't very interesting!

http://www.electronics-lab.com/action/gallery/insi de_crt/