Hi all,
My kid has been programming Scratch for a few years now. I think this may be a good time to introduce him to the embedded world. I am trying to decide between Energia, Arduino and, well, Scratch (which also has robotic functionalities).
For a school project (which does not have to include electronics of course), he has a choice of 1) adding some sort of simple electronic functionality to an animal, or 2) sensing sound frequencies and responding in some ways.
The project has a limited budget (they have not told us yet exactly how limited, but it has to be low).
Scratch would be the easiest, because he already knows it; perhaps an MSP430 launchpad, or just a few standard sensors, motors and LEDs can be connected to it in a simple enough way? (Does not look that way, and is OT anyway, but I thought I'd ask).
Motors would be nice, but can't be powered directly from an MSP430 pin as far as I understand, and so I am not sure I want to introduce them just yet.
I am thinking maybe make a cat that will meow when being pet? Can that be done directly from pins? It can also light its eyes.
Should I invest in Arduino, or can everything be done with Energia just as easily? How portable is software/hardware?
Also, I do want to buy a few motors just in case - where?
As for the second project, detecting sound frequencies and providing some sort of an output based on them? - any way to do that, however roughly, without FFT? I've read that the range of audible frequencies is 20 to 20,000 Hz, well within the operating range of an MSP430; but he can't do any complex programming. Any ideas? Maybe a device into which a sound wave can be fed unaltered, that would produce some interesting effect?
Sorry if these questions are too basic for the forum; we have the blind leading the blind kind of a situation here.