I got myself an Arduino and immediately went on to try the (simplest) “Blink” example. It was very cool to make the LED on the board blink, I admit. But then I went on to find out how to build stuff like a 4x4x4 LED cube or a (relatively) simple universal remote and I realized two things:
- Most of the stuff has already been created by others.
- They already did it much better than I ever would.
I realized that I’m not really into soldering and connecting wires. I’m more of a “high level” kind of guy – I like taking ready-made parts and creating new things with them, not mess with the low level stuff. It’s also true with software – while I enjoy seeing the possibilities of building useful libraries with a language just like the next guy, I still prefer using them over trying to write them.
So I’m still looking for nice (and hopefully new) things to do with the Arduino that will either be fun or useful for me. I might even try some wiring :)
If you can get it to speak your car’s CAN protocols you can probably do some neat and semi-useful tricks (a remote that turns on the engine and air-conditioning from the office would be nice, although perhaps more than most cars can currently do via their CAN implementations without further hacking which would definitely void your warranty).
Also, the world of home audio-video is full of things that although others have indeed already done, are ridiculously easy and outrageously expensive. e.g. If you can get a decent RF universal remote without donating a kidney – let me know.
The CAN protocols is an interesting possibility. I’ll look into it.
As for a universal remote… I looked into universal IR remote and turns out it’s very complicated because of the different IR protocols by different manufacturers. It’s hard to get right and the signal processing code is more than I can handle (but people have done it already.)
I’m sure I’ll find something to do :)