The Awesome Button 80
An anonymous reader writes "An awesome hardware hack which demonstrates how easily USB-based human interface devices (eg, Keyboards and Mice) can be created using the Arduino software environment."
A very nice little project based on the Teensy USB Development Board. Reminds me of the breadboard electronics projects my Dad used to work on with me many years ago. "Great fun for young and old," you might say.
Re:Obligitory Arduino Fetish Rant (Score:5, Interesting)
Arduino gives you all the pieces you need to start using microcontrollers - hardware and software environments, lots of contributed libraries and applications. If you want to write stuff from scratch you can, but if you want to get started building your blinky-light thing, it's all there, and then you can go on to more complex projects. It has a few limitations (Teensy gets around the USB-vs-serial issues, for instance), but it's pretty complete and extremely expandable. If you're more interested in tweaking bits, you can use many different tools, but if you're really trying to add blinky lights to your backpack or move the servo arms on a robot thingy or program the lights on your Christmas tree to respond to music or controlling your thermostat, you can use the Arduino tools to do that without diving into the bit-bashing first.
And yes, you could have just bought the AVR ATmega chip yourself, but then you'd have needed a in-circuit chip-programmer device, which costs just about the same as an Arduino, and you can load a program into the Arduino to make it be a chip-programmer, so you might as well buy the Arduino anyway.