Author Topic: Getting started with Arduino  (Read 3914 times)

Dragon

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Getting started with Arduino
« on: September 02, 2014, 00:24:15 »
Last week I took my son to the Tampa Hackerspace meetup. We hadn't ever been there before, but we found that they were a nice group of people and we stuck around a couple hours talking with a few people and checking out the projects that they were working on. There were at least 3 quad-copters in the works, so many of the people were either working on one or talking about one, but one of the other subjects that game up a few times was the Arduino. I had heard about the Arduino microcontroller before, a few years ago when I went to a Hacker 101 forum at Dragon*Con, but up until this weekend I had never played with one myself. Fortunately, the day after going to the Hackerspace meetup, my friend and co-worker, Phillip, mentioned that he had an Arduino that I could borrow to try out.

So far I've just done a few things with the Arduino, but I'm hoping that my son will get more interested in it since he has lately become interested in robots. He seemed interested at first, and then a little bit here and there, but mostly he has been watching other stuff on YouTube rather than focusing on this, even while I've been researching and trying stuff out. The Arduino Comic provided a nice introduction for me, since I've never really learned about electronics in this way. I figured out how to get all of the examples working, even though the breadboard and some other components, such as the button and analog knob, in the comic diagrams were different.

Anyway, I'm starting to have some fun with this, so I hope it's only the beginning. The last one that I put together tonight before writing this was a setup that had 3 lights that would each come on for a second and then off again in rotation, first a red led, then a green one, then a yellow one, and then the loop would start over. That was one that I wired up and wrote the program for based on some of the other ideas but it was pretty much my own so I was pretty excited to show it off to my wife. It felt nice that she was happy for me and encouraging even though this is just a little play thing right now.
"Hello IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again? ... OK, well, the button on the side. Is it glowing?... Yeah, you need to turn it on. Err, the button turns it on. Yeah, you do know how a button works, don't you? No, not on clothes." - Roy (The IT Crowd)