First time readers: What is this? How do I start?

Most of electronics projects are built around the tuxgraphics ethernet board which you can either build yourself or order at http://shop.tuxgraphics.org/electronic/index-eth.html. For the projects and code written by tuxgrahics it does not matter which type of board you order the code can run on any of those boards.

Although this board could be used for many different things it is mainly used for two things:

A web server with the possibility to control hardware and read measurements
A client (aka webbrowser) that uploads data periodically to a website

To start with I would recommend you to scan through the different projects we have in the AVR ethernet / web server section.

Some of the projects are available as on pre-loaded boards (http://shop.tuxgraphics.org/electronic/mini-webserver-with-software.html). To those boards you just add a few sensors or other components needed for the particular project and you have it up and running.

For the regular ethernet boards and other microcontroller projects you will need a programmer to be able to load the software to the board. The tuxgraphics programmer hardware to load software is called "avrusb500" (http://shop.tuxgraphics.org/electronic/index-avr-programmer.html) and it can be used from Windows, Linux or Apple Mac.

The Software development section has some tutorials explaining how to program a microcontroller and what is needed in terms of applications on your PC (Windows, Linux or Mac) to compile and load software.

Let’s start the fun