Moving Right Along

I have made some progress.

On the software side, I have been working on a MVC design for the dart game engine, which will allow for easy plug-in capability.  No more real code has been written, though.  Looking at the following examples for guidance:
http://learn.adafruit.com/boarduino-kits/usb-boarduino-assembly
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7249388/python-duck-typing-for-mvc-event-handling-in-pygame

On the hardware side, I got me a desk and set up my mackerspace and assembled the boarduino.  I started out soldering the socket to the board with a 40W iron, which was probably too hot.  It's been awhile since I've soldered, and I've never soldered much, so i was worried about ruining the boarduino. I went pretty quickly on most of the pins, so hopefully i didn't do any damage.  For the header pins, I went to a 25W iron which worked just as well and made me less nervous about a meltdown.

This here is what I did:
http://learn.adafruit.com/boarduino-kits/usb-boarduino-assembly

I loaded up the Arduino IDE hooked the boarduino to the laptop with a mini USB cable and loaded on the Blink sketch, the "hello world" of Arduinos.  Of course, I picked the wrong board in the IDE, so the first few attempts to upload the code failed and made me think I destroyed the board or let it sit in the closet for too many years.  Finally picked the correct board and had it blinking in no time.

My next step will be to get familiar with the shift registers and writing sketches.  Will probably start with controlling 8 LEDs since there are examples on the web I can reference if I get stuck.

Not much exciting here to anyone but me... getting the boarduino built was my big first step in making progress on the dartboard project.