The Arduino is a small, inexpensive computer that can be programmed to control endless creations limited only by your imagination. As you’ll soon see, the Arduino can be used to make a whole host of projects, like a ghost detector, joystick-controlled laser, electronic die, laser trip wire alarm, motion sensor alarm, keypad entry system, and many others. All of these projects are easy to build and have one thing in common—they use the power of the Arduino. In the early 1980s, I picked up a great Penguin paperback titled something like Gadgets and Gizmos, hidden away in a local bookstore. The projects were simple ones like making a working lighthouse using flashlight bulbs and building a revolving display table using an old clock. The ideas in that book sparked my imagination, and I’ve been creating ever since.
This is a step-by-step course to get you building cool Arduino projects even with no prior experience! This Arduino course is a compilation of 25 projects divided into 5 Modules that you can build by following clear step-by-step instructions with schematics and downloadable code. Click the figure below to check out the course.
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.
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.