Getting Started with the Arduino Uno R3 and Windows 8

Continuing on with my Windows 8 growing pains, I encountered issues just attempting to install the driver for the Arduino R3 board.  After following the basic steps which worked fine in Win7, you are greeted with:  Arduino UNO R3, The third-party INF does not contain digital signature information.

After a little online dumpster diving, I found the solution on the Arduino forums in a post from Louis Davis in March 2012 (appears to be during the Win8 beta based on the date).  The key to the solution is to disable the Win8 default requirement for all drivers to be digitally signed.  The steps are basically the same today, although Microsoft rearranged the menus a bit since that time.  The following are the steps I followed to get the drivers installed:

• From the Win8 desktop, run (Windows Key + R) the following command:

shutdown.exe /r /o /f /t 00

• Windows will restart to a options screen, navigate as follows:

select Troubleshoot
select Advanced options
select Startup Settings
press the Restart button

• The system will reboot to a Startup Settings menu

select 7) Disable driver signature enforcement

The system will now reboot with the driver digital signature options disabled.

From this point, you can proceed with the normal Arduino install procedures.  Note that under Win8, the initial device appears under "Other devices", not under "COM & LPT" as seen below.

Right click the Unknown Device and choose update drivers, then select the driver directory (and disable the feature to include subfolders):

With driver enforcement now disabled in Win8, you will be given the following option:

And after selecting "Install this driver software anyway", the installation will complete as expected:

Building a new workshop PC

The old dinosaur of a pc in my workshop was long overdue for retirement.  Rather than taking the easy way out and buying a quick turnaround Dell, I decided it was far too long since I had built a rig from scratch on my own.  I sourced all the materials from Amazon and thanks to prime shipping, had all the needed parts in two days.

I decided to go large on the case, and selected a Thermaltake Level 10 GT.  This case has an absolutely enormous interior, plenty of cutouts for wiring, 3 large fans, and a hot-swappable drive rack.

 

To power the beast, I selected the Corsair Professional Series AX850, an ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe, an Intel Core i7-3770K Quad-Core Processor, and 32GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM.

To keep the CPU cool, I went with an after market fan, the Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO.  Compared to the little thing that Intel ships with the processor, the 212 EVO is enormous.  There is not an awful lot I remember from my undergrad heat transfer class, but I do remember that surface area counts, and in that category, there is absolutely no comparison between the fans.

Since the components above depleted most of my available budget, I decide to forgo a solid state drive for the time being, and stuck with a good old fashioned drive, the Seagate Barracuda 7200 3 TB.  The thing is a bit noisy on startup, but overall seems to be performing well and for $45/TB, its hard to argue with a bit of noise.

Everything installed without too much hassle, and thanks to all the wiring cutouts, the finished product is clean (I really need to learn to take final pictures AFTER the cable ties are added) and should be fairly easy to maintain.

And finally, as a totally aesthetic feature, the case has a number of exterior cutouts and LEDs which are a big hit with the "little engineers" running around the house.

So far all of the parts are behaving well, and I would recommend any one of them.