I was looking at an Arduino tutorial and noticed they had a rather nice computer diagram of an Arduino, showing how to connect all the wires up for the project

I decided to check out the link for the Fritzing program that was used to make the diagram. This freely downloadable software for PC, Mac and Linux is pretty neat. You can diagram out an Arduino breadboard layout, and then turn that in to a real schematic and even PCB layout. The layout can then be exported and sent off to have boards made. I have never done anything like this before, but I am having fun experimenting…

The following picture shows something I was playing with. It doesn’t work — it was just me experimenting with some objects. But, I think this program might end up being pretty fun to play with. Check it out.

(Above was some initial concept work done on “yet another” joystick converter. This one will be designed to hook a modern USB joystick or mouse up to an old Tandy 1000 or Color Computer. I also plan to allow it to do the same thing with a PC keyboard to the CoCo. For emulation fans, the reverse is also planned, allowing an analog TRS-80 joystick to be hooked up to a modern computer via USB, and the same thing with a CoCo keyboard. This is going to take a bit more work than what I have done so far, but it seems pretty straight forward, once I figure out how to use switching transistors…)