Some new toys came in last week. A while back before I started the badge project, I ordered a thermostat because it said it had built in Zigbee, a LCD, and some input buttons. I figured It would be a cool device to hack on but after looking into it more, most of the sites including the manufacturer side said that it was a Zwave module. So I kinda wrote that off as a bad buy. But after getting it in I found out It did have Zigbee. It had an Xbee module that I could remove and use in other projects. Possibly to dev on the badge project.

Second I got my Arduino Pro 3.3v in. I didn’t realize how much easier it would be to have the nice FTDI cable to program it. I don’t have a built-in Serial adapter (Macbook Air) so I tried to use a the USB to Serial adapter while supplying the board with 9v, but the adapter I have kind of sucks so that board is on hold until I order the FTDI cable.

I was able to get some input buttons working on the dev board. I also switched to a bigger bread board to accommodate some more components. I had 6 push buttons but after doing some testing I found that only 4 of them actually worked. So I wired up the 4 that I had and I was then able to to move up, down, left, and right on the bottom menu. Next I need to figure out what this thing is going to actually do, be it a game or some other type of application.