To start the new year well in the tinkering department, I bought an Arduino! What’s that, you ask? Well, the Arduino website explains it thusly:

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators. The microcontroller on the board is programmed using the Arduino programming languageWiring) and the Arduino development environment (based on Processing). Arduino projects can be stand-alone or they can communicate with software on running on a computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP).

Arduino Duemilanove board

It has been around for a few years now, and I have always had an interest in programming microprocessors to allow devices, contraptions, etc to be functional independent of a PC. With Arduino, interfacing with the outside world is easier than ever which convinced me I should give it a try.

Since I live in the Netherlands, I looked for a resource in my country that provided Arduino’s. After looking through the list of suppliers in the Netherlands, I ended up buying from Floris.CC and ordere the “Arduino Experimentation Kit“, made by Oomlout and ordered from Floris.cc

Since receiving it, I played around with the thing a bit and what struck me most is the ease with which you can build contraptions that sense and act on their environment. In the next few weeks I will do a write up on the ARDX kit itself.

Playing (becaues that really is what it is!) with the Arduino is so much fun that it instantly sparks many creative ideas that this thing can help with. As those ideas are developed, I will do write-ups here to share the knowledge I gain.

If you want to know more about Arduino, get started with this PDFCast from Make Magazine, or watch these “Arduino 101″ video’s on YouTube.

Arduino Logo

See here the progress after only 4 days:

That was on March 2, and look at the progress two days after that:

This looks very promising. Some of the earth is already being pushed out by the developing roots of the seeds, so I will have to put them in a larger pot this weekend. It is beautiful to see the seed-shells still hanging on one of the leaves. Beautiful to see these germinate and grow so fast! It is also evident, one of the six pots is not doing anything.

Unfortunately, the herb-kit and the lavender have not shown any progress yet

I got myself a few different kits to see how good they are (or probably, how good I am). I bought one with sunflowers, one with lavender and one kit with six different herbs; Parsley, Chives, Marjoran, Thym, Celery and Basil. They cost between 2,5 and 4 euro per kit. Besides these little greenhouses, I also bought a little bonsai tree kit.

The kits come in little plastic greenhouses:

When opening the kit, you will find six small pots, a description and a bag containing the earth. In this kit the pots were clay, which gives it a solid feel. The sunflower kit as well as the lavender kit contained plastic pots, which was a bit of a disappointment. Clay seems so much more cute.

The whole thing is pretty easy to put together. Put the earth in the pots, put the seeds in the earth, make sure the earth is moist and compact it a little bit, and put the pots back in the little greenhouse.

A tip for those that do not have green fingers normally (much like me): When you start a kit with six different herbs, you probably won’t know what herb is in which pot once you put it all together, so mark the pots

Once all is in the greenhouse, you just put it in a spot with natural light in your house and keep it at room temperature (around 20 degrees Celsius). Make sure you keep the soil moist, but do not drown the seeds.

Depending on the kit you bought, the instructions may be a bit different. These herbs are to be in a light spot. So do the sunflowers. But a little bonsai kit I bought (more on that in later posts), needs the shade.

In a bout 4 to 10 weeks, these should germinate and start showing us some life. When they have grown to be about 3 to 4 cm, they have to be put in separate, larger pots of about 10 cm diameter. The sunflowers I plan to put in one big pot, and probably the lavender too.

Once the sunflowers start growing, it will be important to turn around the greenhouse every day, to prevent the flowers from growing to the light on one side only.

First impressions are: fun! This is simple fun and feels a bit like having a pet. You will need to take good care of these in order for it to grow. However, the plastic greenhouses are flimsy and do not work very well. I am probably going to look for something nicer to grow them in.

But for now let’s see how this goes. I plan to show you photo’s here of the progress on a regular basis, but it will be a few weeks before anything will start to show.