Now that I got The STPC working with Win2K and Dot.Net 2.0 installed on it, I started on the other aspect of the project – microcontroller integration. My plan is to get the PC board [SIC] to do the heavy lifting and the microcontroller to do the nervous system (think sympathetic) stuff, minute-to-minute. The first step was to get the Arbotix (Trossen Robotics) board communicating. Once I got a good serial connection going, then the layers for .Net could be assumed to work as well (eventually, one step-at-a-time). The board did not work with the Arduino IDE out of the box. The suggestions were followed from the Arbotix web site, but I came up with errors (build.target was “null”, and suggested the preferences was not right). Nothing on the web directly pointing to this error with Arbotix, but a few with Arduinos – but for different reasons. Bottom line: pasting the board specs onto the end of ‘boards.txt’ did not work – always threw that error. After deleting ‘preferences.txt’ and stripping out most of boards in ‘boards.txt’, I decided to replace the parameters for the ‘Mini’ with the Arbotix ones.  I renamed the the first line so I would know “…##mini.name=Arduino (Arbotix)”. I compiled the ‘Blink’ sketch with pin 2 selected without any errors. Uploaded the sketch to the board – no errors so far. Hooked up a breadboard with an LED and resistor to digital pin ‘D2’ and the booger started blinking as it should. Finally!
