I quit, but I'm back

I almost gave up on the project. Financial times were getting tight, I was frustrated about all the other stuff that I needed to take care of. Some clown was able to get into my paypal account, and take all my ebay sales money, plus a little more. Paypal made things good, but it took a couple weeks to work out. A couple other things happened, and I was able to make the money deal work out.

My laptop had a flakey hard drive, so I bought a new one. 50GB for $500. Sure the 1TB drives aren't a lot more, but they are 3-1/2" ones. Internal laptop drives are a little more expensive. IT works better than before, plenty of space, but I still have to load all the software. I've gotten everything loaded, and the arduino talks to it fine. Tonight I installed Java, and waiting for eclipse to download.

I still have very little time, but I am making progress. I've built the protoboard. I modified it to be stackable with the bluetooth module, and am testing with an LM34, for the OAT sensor. Once I get the Eclipse installed, along with the amarino software fully configured, I should be good to go with the screen layout. I guess that is something I could have been working on all alone.

Keep the notes coming in. Love the feedback.

It works!

I finally got the itread studio stackable bluetooth card. It works right out of the box (or appears to, I haven't actually written code to make it do something). It connected right to the amarino app on the phone. I was a little nervous about plugging this into a mega arduino, since it doesn't have the same pinout as the basic arduino. Using the schematics for both the arduino and the shield, and dang, they line up. Being stackable, the pins are still usable (mostly).

I also ordered some blank prototype boards from itread studio. They are the mega sized ones, so I shouldn't loose anything. The board appears to have space to put one of the bluetooth boards, so I may be able to replace this shield with the prototype board. I should plan it out, and put things in eagle so that I can build a engine monitor shield. It only takes time.

I would like to get more folks coming to this site. I am looking for good ideas to get this promoted. It seems I am not spending enough time building to finish, so I don't feel strong about pushing things until I am done, in case I don't finish.

Feedback would be welcome.