My Arduino Wiki

So this is a kind of personal Arduino Wiki. Only just started out using the Arduino and there’s loads to learn. However instead of blogging this content I think it’s more suitable giving it a page of its own as it be frequently be updated (?) and be a personal source of reference.

So my real life hands hand of Arduino started off by getting a starter kit from “oomlout”. I’ve no idea what it means but it’s one of a small number of places I could get an Arduino starter kit in the UK.

For reference here’s the list of the ones I know about in the UK:

It was a toss up between oomlout & CoolComponents, oomlout won out. My first kit from oomlout arrived the day after I ordered it, and some additional bits I ordered also arrived the next day, great service! Not only that but oomlout include handy ‘noddy’ guides on how to use their kit which is really useful. I won’t deny that other sites have more available, but great service and useful reference material go a long way to making them the first choice for me.

Only had the kit for about a week and some of that old electronics knowledge is coming back (I’ve got honours degree in it!). It’s funny though how I’ve come to better appreciate stuff now that I want to learn it. I’ve been working through the starter kit that reasonably comprehensive for getting you going including a motor, temperature sensor, light sensor and a bunch of other components. Following the examples I’ve been able to get a few basic circuits up and running and started measuring temperature etc. Some of the examples just didn’t seem to work however but it’s down to lack of basic knowledge on the Arduino.

A lot of the examples I’ve looked at (I’ll come to those later) focus on the programming of the Arduino, they mostly skip over the hardware, and that includes the kit I bought from oomlout. After a week of playing with the kit I’ve come to realise that a key missing bit is a hardware of the Arduino Uno and what each of the components to do. I was struggling getting my temperature sensor to work, it turns out I was using a digital input pin instead of an analogue. Simple mistake to make but it’s because all the previous examples had been using those pins. However I did eventually work it out, helped by the following resource on the main Arduino website:

http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardUno

I am however still a bit stuck by naming conventions between the hardware and software, which caused my initial confusion. I was using pin 1 digital when it should have been pin 1 analogue, but it’s less than obvious how that is referenced in code. I need to go back and have a look at that.

Currently I’m finishing up the examples that came with the kit and once I’m happy I know what I’ve been doing I’ll be going through other examples building up my knowledge. The following sites seem to provide a good range of things to try:

Ladyada.net – A site created by Limor (getting a Masters from MIT!) with some simple examples to follow
- Covered most of these ones
Arduino Home – The main reference site, not tried these yet
Adafruit Industries – Not really looked at these ones yet
tronixstuff - Another WordPress blog on Arduino, with tutorials
SheepDogGuides – Not been through these yet either
SparkFun – Commercial site with tutorials
IBM Laser Game??? – No idea what this has to do with IBM but it looks interesting

There’s obviously loads of other reference sites with info on the Arduino, but I’m not moving onto them until I’ve got the basics sorted, but’s here’s some:

Arduino Community
Freeduino – Loads of reference material

The Arduino site has loads of reference material, you can’t buy one of these and not go there!

Once I’ve got myself a good enough grounding I plan on trying the following couple of projects, maybe I blog them here if I’m successful:

Remote control vehicle with obstacle avoidance
Wireless sensor network (with upload to the web?) Zigbee? X10? RF? Other? Still need to work all that out

And here’s some advanced stuff that’ll take me a while to get to:

Fabio Biondi’s Blog