This project was my attempt at an Arduino mobile device that had more than one function. some of it's features are: a 16x2 LCD screen, three switches to control brightness and sound, a dual axis joystick, a soft click button, an expansion connector and access to the connectors of the Arduino Uno that is the brains of the operation. in terms of software there are 3 games/ build in programs to play with. There is a small scale cookie clicker game, a jumping game kind of like the chrome dino game (I did not make the code for this, someone else did) and a punch card reader interface. I also made a module that plugs into the expansion connector to use a a punch card reader and it works pretty well. For it I made somewhere around 40 punch cards for all of the letters of the alphabet, all of the numbers from 0 to 9 and also a few bits of punctuation.

This was a relatively small project on the scale of things but it was still quite fun to do. To start, I had a small solar panel from a old solar powered light that was laying around so I soldered a XT30 to the wire and soldered up a few adapters for it. The adapters that I made were as follows: a alligator clip adapter, a barrel plug adapter (5.5mm), a voltage measuring adapter and a current measuring adapter. The voltage measuring adapter was just an XT30 with staggered bare 14awg wires on the end. this is so you can hook up the alligator clips from your multimeter to it to measure the output voltage of the solar panel. The current measuring adapter is almost the same except there is another connector is series with the first so that you can plug in another adapter, hook up your multimeter to it and measure the current draw of the load. The other adapters are pretty self explanatory.

This was not actually my idea or my own creation, it came in a kit that included almost everything that you need to build it. (all that was missing was a soldering iron and solder) Despite this, I still decided to include it because I really like the idea and it was one of my best soldering jobs at the time, even though there were something like a hundred pins to solder. With that being said, here are some features: an 8x8 RGB led matrix, 6 clicky buttons, 8 separate low power leds and a buzzer. The way that you program it is by plugging into the 6 pin connector, a FTDI friend or something similar and hooking it up to your computer. There are a ton of different programs that you can download off of the internet, or if you like coding, you can code something yourself.