Playing with Arduino

For quite some time I’ve wanted to play with Arduino and after the Rock City project, where I did a lot of soldering and hardware integration (based on Phidgets) I decided it was about time I got started. I picked up the kit today and I just couldn’t stop playing with it. The kit that I got was the Ultimate Microcontroller pack from MakerShed. Lot’s of components and I also added a bunch of extra sensors that I though I might find a use for. So much fun!

Arduino programming is C/C++ based and that’s something I haven’t done much. The syntax seems fairly easy and for now I haven’t run into what I’ve always dreaded the most with C - memory management issues. I’m sure I’ll run into some, but I’ve picked up a couple books to read over xmas so that I can try to avoid things like that. I’ve posted a short vid of my first project done without following a tutorial below.

I have one question for those of you reading this that have Arduino experience:
Why will only some of my LED’s fade in/out?
I’m using “analogWrite” to set a value between 0 and 255. Those that don’t fade will always toggle at a value of 128. I’ve swapped around the LED and resistor and that makes no difference. It seems this is related to the I/O ports used. You can see this in the video below.