More and more makerspaces around the world are looking to add coding and electronics to their maker education programs. One of the best ways to do this is by integrating an Arduino board into makerspace projects and lessons. We’ve found that a lot of maker educators haven’t taken the plunge into coding or Arduino because they think programming is scary. Because of this, we wanted to make sure this tutorial was written for the absolute beginner with no experience whatsoever. This tutorial is a high level view of all the parts and pieces of the Arduino ecosystem. In future posts, we will take you step by step in creating your first simple Arduino project.
There are different ways to program the ESP8266, but I'll only cover the method using the Arduino IDE. This is really easy for beginners, and it's a very familiar environment if you've used Arduino boards before. Just keep in mind that it's not limited to this option: there's also an official SDK available to program it in real C, this is very useful if you want to optimize your code or do some advanced tricks that aren't supported by the Arduino IDE. Another possibility is to flash it with a LUA interpreter, so you can upload and run LUA scripts. Or maybe you're more familiar with Python? Then you should check out the MicroPython firmware to interpret MicroPython scripts. I'm sure there's other languages available as well, so just do a quick Google search and write your code in the language of your choice.
This eBook is a compilation of some of my most popular Arduino projects. For more Arduino projects, take a look at our Arduino project’s repository. I encourage you to watch some of the video demonstrations. Some of my projects are easier to understand if you can see the circuit in action. This eBook has the purpose to inspire you create something amazing with electronics and programing. After you create something cool, I hope you share it with others. That’s the whole goal of this awesome community. To all my readers, thank you for your interest in my work. I really appreciate it! Have fun with your projects, Rui Santos P.S. Make sure you visit my website to see the latest projects
A micro controller is an integrated circuit that is capable of running programs. There are many instances of those on the market today from a variety of manufacturers. The prices of these micro controllers keeps falling. In the hobbyist market, an open source architecture called "Arduino" that uses the Atmel range of processors has caught the imagination of countless folks. The boards containing these Atmel chips combined with a convention for connections and also a free set of development tools has lowered the entry point for playing with electronics to virtually nill. Unlike a PC, these processors are extremely low end with low amounts of ram and storage capabilities. They won't be replacing the desktop or laptop any time soon. For those who want more "oomph" in their processors, the folks over at Raspberry PI have developed a very cheap (~$45) board that is based on the ARM processors that has much more memory and uses micro SD for persistent data storage. These devices run a variant of the Linux operating system. I'm not going to talk further about the Raspberry PI as it is in the class of "computer" as opposed to microprocessor.