I recently moved from doing full-time Java & Oracle PL/SQL in a Windows environment (with Rails development in my free time) to doing full-time Rails development on Mac OS X.  This post lists a few helpful little tidbits that I’ve found along the way that I thought someone on the Interwebs might find useful.  I call it Part I not because I’m holding back on you, but more because hopefully it will encourage me to post some more on this subject in the future.

If you’re on Mac OS X and you want to grab the color value of something else on your screen to use in your website, there is a tool that comes with OS X for just that purpose called DigitalColor Meter.  Do ⌘+Space and type “Color” and select the DigitalColor Meter to bring it up. Check its menus for more features, such as copying the current color value to the clipboard.

You can log javascript objects directly to the Firebug console with console.log. Then you can drill into your object in the console and see all its properties in Firebug, rather than pushing a bunch of strings into alert();. This even works with Facebook apps.  More information here: Firebug Console Object

In the main Firefox Tools menu, there is an “Error Console” item.  It is apparently not part of FireBug, but Firefox itself.  This thing is awesome. It shows you JS and CSS errors and warnings, and it doesn’t lose them when you redirect to another page.

A few people have been surprised when they’ve seen me do this, so I thought I’d throw it in.  Firebug has a little button to tell it to run in its own window which is especially helpful if you have two monitors.  You can do this with the little round “^” button in firebug, shown with the smudgy red arrow below.

Well, that’s all the tidbits for now. What are your favorite tidbits?

Some cool things about it are the USB port — you can upload programs, power the board, and receive communications from the board all using USB.  (Or you can use an AC adapter for power). Also, the Arduino app you can use to interface from your computer runs great from my MacBook.  And, I love how everything on the board is just so small and cute.

The book Getting Started with Arduino is excellent.  It is written for someone with no particular electronics or programming experience, and despite that, it manages to walk through several little projects which anyone could do and which should demystify the whole thing.  The examples seem simple, and the book is pretty small, but in the end, it really does give you a starting point, and it points out web resources if you want to go into detail on, say, some particular type of sensor.  There are plenty more involved projects online for further reference.

As to why I’m interested, I have a top-secret project in mind, which I’ll reveal if it ever gets off the ground.  And then you can think, “wow, that’s lame.”  But it would be even worse if I revealed my lame project idea and then it didn’t even work.  Anyways, I have this idea for a project, and I thought it should use a microcontroller.  I was originally thinking I could use my Motorola 68HC11 from college, so I pulled it out of the box.  I paid over $100 for it in 1998, so surely I could put it to good use, right?  Here it is on its evaluation board:

The MCU itself is the square chip on the lower left.  Immediately, I realized that (1) it requires serial cables, (2) it requires something to power it (+12V, -12V, +5V and ground), (3) the software I have for interfacing to it is on floppy disks and runs on DOS, and (4) I have almost completely forgotten assembly language, and really, everything about this board.  And it has been discontinued by Motorola, so if I ever wanted to make something else, I’d have to start over anyways.

So, after these realizations, I went searching for something new, and the Arduino seemed to be the way to go for a hobbyist.  I am very happy with my Arduino kit, and I’ll be sure to post about my project if it ever works.

BTW, a couple great resources for Arduino projects:  http://www.embedds.com/ posts a new project every day.  I haven’t tried any of them yet, but I hope to soon.  The projects sound very interesting, like this one for an Arduino Theremin .  And of course there is Make Magazine but the blog is a little more prolific than I can actually keep up with.

[Update: I forgot to mention that the hacktronics arduino starter kit didn't quite have all the components used in the examples in the Getting Started with Arduino book.  In particular, it didn't have a pushbutton switch or a light-dependent resistor.]