Comment by Randy Harvey on January 19, 2013 at 2:37pm

Nice Job!  What type of Arduino did you use?  A random number/time generator would make this a great use for  yard lights at night or while on vacation..

Comment by Jonathan Dean on January 19, 2013 at 6:37pm

That's very cool, and using the faceplace makes it look nice and finished.  Nice job!

Comment by John Malone on January 20, 2013 at 4:51pm

Thanks for the kudos.
It was really my first experimentation in to micro controllers and relays. I know some basic electronic theory but haven't assembled anything before.
I bought the Arduino as part of a kit from YouDuino: http://arduino-direct.com/sunshop/index.php?l=product_detail&p=244
My next projects will be using a HackDuino ( http://www.instructables.com/id/Perfboard-Hackduino-Arduino-compati... ) to reduce the cost to less than $10 a project.
I bought another YourDuino to use as the development platform and have loaded the boot loader on to new ATMega328P chips, So I'm on my way.

Comment by Jonathan Dean on January 20, 2013 at 5:02pm

Given that you were able to hook it all up and go so far as to make a functional UI with an LCD and a few buttons, I'd say you've gotten the hang of it!  Do you have a lot of programming experience?

Comment by John Malone on January 20, 2013 at 7:50pm

I'd better own up to the fact that I was a C/C++ programmer for about 10 years before jumping the technical fence to network administrator/DBA, so I'm pretty comfortable with Arduino coding.
It's fun to be able to interact with the physical world with the code for a change rather than just shuffling bits and bytes around.

Comment by Jonathan Dean on January 21, 2013 at 10:30am

That's pretty much my experience as well.  Programming is fun, but being able to interact with things outside of the computer is pretty awesome.

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