Arduino - Whoo!

I have in my posession, (it's not mine though) an Arduino Uno. Quite a departure from Actionscript, CreateJS etc (except I'm not departing them...)

What Is Arduino For?

I'm not quite sure yet, but it can take input from a variety of sensors, and it can connect to output, eg. lights motors etc. So although it seems quite limited in terms of memory, it seems to have a lot of potential. Anyway, I'm sure it has more potential than I'll ever be able to make use of, so, who cares what it's limits are! Also, I read somewhere that it may be able to work with Flash...

I've found some great tutorials online, the first one is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCxzA9_kg6s

I'm just making notes of anything extra.

I went through tutorial 1, and the first issue I came across was installing the driver. They guy in the video had a later version of Windows than me. The help on arduino.cc for XP users also didn't match what I saw on my screen.

So, I went to the Control Panel, System, Device Driver, and was faced with a long list of things... I don't know what they were. I couldn't see anything called Arduino, and I couldn't see what they suggested might be under ports either. But when I unplugged and replugged the arduino board back in, something appeared under USB. So I followed the recommended procedure (section number 4 on this page: http://arduino.cc/en/Guide/windows) with this instead. And that worked fine.

The second issue was when I tried to upload the program, actually, I think it worked the first time, but when I tried to make changes, I couldn't see any effect. In the video (the first link above), an error message came up when he had forgotten to set the serial port - which he changed but then didn't show how to do it from the menu.

When I tried to upload, I got this error message:

avrdude stk500_getsync(): not in sync resp=0x00

When I changed the com port (go to Tools, Serial Port, and then select a different com port) everything was fine after that.