I’ve been reading about the Arduino system in various places around the web and in magazines I’ve picked up ehre and there. Picked up an issue of Nuts and Volts on a recent trip to read during a flight – I didn’t need to re-read airplane flight sales catalog again. I ordered a couple. I had some ideas on where I could use it. It has analog and digital input and outputs, and looked like it would be easy to get up and going.

I got them, downloaded the zip that had the system in it. Ran a driver installation. Unzipped the program. It saw the board OK the first time and I could run the Blink example program. Made a couple changes to the progrm and it worked. I then downloaded the library for the LCD Color panal I also bought (they call their add on boards “Shields”, so I’ll go with that) called the Color LCD Shield. I unzipped the library. Opened up the project, the library and then couldn’t get it to work. Played around trying to get paths and other things straight but didn’t have any luck.

I’d used a few development environments before so I tried many of the things I’d learned over the years but didn’t have any luck with this one. I went to Sparkfun.com where I bought everything and read through the forum about this. Finally posted the question and got a response within a decent amount of time from Jimbo with some suggestions. Went back and forth a couple times and finally figured it out.

It seems that there are some partiulars about the Arduino system that are needed but don’t jump out at you when you start using it.

For others that may hit this problem here’s what I did – I deleted everything Arduino I had installed. Actually the program doesn’t “install” in the normal windows sense, it just unzips and then you find it and run it from there.

I unzipped it again and put it in my c:\users\’loginname’\documents\” directory which should end up with the path to the arduino.exe and other files being “c:\users\’loginname’\documents\arduino\”. Then I unzipped the colorlcdshield library into the libraries folder within the arduino folder.

Then I unzipped ChronoLCD_color into the ..\arduino\examples folder. Plugged the Arduino in and Chrono shows up under Files, Examples. Opened it and the line JimbO refers to, lcd.init(EPSON) shows up. Changed it to PHILLIPS and it works.

I did find that the color definitions don’t match correctly, probably an Epson / Phillips difference? So far, BLUE and RED are reversed.

I’ll post more as I get them.
later ….