I made an order late last week from the excellent folks at Spikenzie Labs to replace a fraction of what I lost when I left Diyode and Guelph. Mainly, a new soldering iron and some kits to play with. So now I can finish my extra Codeshields and restart a few projects I’ve been meaning to work on.

The project I’d like to work on first is a bit of illumination for the nursary. He doesn’t sleep there at all yet, but when he does, it’ll be nice to have some gentle illumination that can change based on what’s happening – so ground level lighting when we bring him in, change table lighting when we’re over there, and some colour for him to watch while he’s waiting to sleep. Because if he has a few lights, we can just put him in the crib and he’ll be happy from 7-10pm and mom and dad will have lots of time for their own hobbies. Right? Right. These had better be some great lights.

I have no real experience with Arduino, or with anything really. But, as any great artist, I know how to steal. So I’m going to start with one of the available codeshields sketches and work off that – The button, potentiometer, tri-coloured LED and white LED to start, and I’m going to include a non-codeshield componant – a Motion Sensor.

So – How to attach the motion sensor? What pins are free on an arduino with a Codeshield? Are there any extra pins on a Codeshield? Yup! Looks like pins 7 and 8 are free. I used some F/F jumpers to easily add the motion sensor to pin 7 and used it to trigger the LED – Step 1 down, now to figure out what else I can trigger on motion!