Arduino Button Bouncing - Why doesn't my LED remain on?

This is an update to my last posting on Getting Started with Arduino. After a couple of days of frustration, I purchased an Arduino Prototyping Shield (I don't think I'm yet ready to pick up the soldering iron and build it from a kit) as the Freetronics Starter Kit I purchased only comes with a mini breadboard and lots of the tutorials come with a prototyping shield and needed to see something consistent. Anyway, I was looking at this button tutorial on the Arduino website.

The circuit is similar to the one in my last post, and the sketch from the arduino website is reproduced below:

When tested out, the LED only turns on when the button is pressed. Turns out, due to the spring mechanism in the button, a rapid sequence of on off signals are sent when the button is pressed (Remember Arduino is a continous loop!). Hence a delay of about 10-50 milliseconds delay correctly detects a transition, as seen below:

Getting started with Arduino on Freetronics TwentyTen

Barely a week ago, I was happily unboxing my Freetronics Arduino starter kit (available here in Australia) and the Getting started with Arduino book by Massimo Banzi one of the 5 developers of the Arduino environment. The introductory chapters of the book are well written and you get a good sense for the passion of Massimo for electronics and prototyping. The obligatory what is electricity and the water pump analogy out of the way, it gets stuck in the first sketch - making an LED blink. This is relatively easy to achieve and a nice quick and easy success for the beginner.

The next challenge was to use a push-button switch to add some interactivity to the mix. This is where the lack of an endorsed starter kit makes following the book a challenge. There isn't enough of an introduction to the electronics components required (other than explaining where they can be purchased). The diagram uses a full-size bread board which is different to the tiny breadboard that comes in the Freetronics starter kit. Still, its not impossible to figure out. My circuit is shown below:

The LED is partially obscured but the other connections can be easily figured out. A slightly more challenging tutorial is available here.

Arduino Unboxing

Finally after a few days of waiting, my Arduino (I/O) board has arrived and I can get stuck into some prototyping. For those not in the know, Arduino is an open source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board.

Pics below of my box...

More soon on my exploits and the abilities of this nifty little board. Did I mention its dead easy to program?