If you have 30 bucks and a little bit of time, I would highly recommend picking one up. Play around with it and teach yourself how to program it. There were many nights while developing the robot’s circuits when I would hold up a pile of wires to Shayna and be absolutely delighted that I could get a light to blink. 

Anyways…

I would like to share what went into the control panel. There are 3 arduino duemilanove’s in the robot; one controlling the candy dish and hat light, another controls the lights behind the control panel, and the last runs the LOL Shield (marquee). 

Here is the code that went into all three.

1. Candy Dish_Hat Light

2. Panel Lights

3. LOL Shield* 

Download at will. I have to give a BIG shoutout to Adafruit Industries for the code running the panel lights (I  modified their lesson 5 tutorial very little). Also to Jimmy Rogers and his LOL Shield. 

All in all, it took me about a month to put all three of these together. It could have been streamlined on two boards if I was a better programmer (but I’m not) and it could have looked cooler it I was a beter EE, but I’m happy with how it looked. These are very powerful little and (cheap) tools that can do far more than blink lights on and off. 

Enjoy!

*(There are others who need credit for this code and it is at the top of the link)