It's been a while since I posted anything, but I finally have made some progress with the Arduino.

Since I'm building my own board eventually for the railroad signals I'm planning, I wanted to prototype a bare-bones Arduino from the ground up... I ordered a '168 from SparkFun, preloaded with the bootloader and then used the schematic and pinouts from Arduino.cc to build a minimal setup.

I built a small carrier board to put my resonator on for a good connection, wired it up to a 10mm jumbo LED, got the FTDI USB->Serial board connected and while it didn't work the FIRST time (It took a little tinkering) -- I finally uploaded a sketch and it works as expected - which is no simple feat for me right now for the amount of time I have of late...

After I got the Hello Blinky LED sketch running, I did tinker around with a sketch to set the brightness of the LED based on values from the serial port and that worked, too!

At any rate, progress in the forward direction!

[My Sketch after the break]