Book Image

Mastering Arduino

By : Jon Hoffman
Book Image

Mastering Arduino

By: Jon Hoffman

Overview of this book

Mastering Arduino is an all-in-one guide to getting the most out of your Arduino. This practical, no-nonsense guide teaches you all of the electronics and programming skills that you need to create advanced Arduino projects. This book is packed full of real-world projects for you to practice on, bringing all of the knowledge in the book together and giving you the skills to build your own robot from the examples in this book. The final two chapters discuss wireless technologies and how they can be used in your projects. The book begins with the basics of electronics, making sure that you understand components, circuits, and prototyping before moving on. It then performs the same function for code, getting you into the Arduino IDE and showing you how to connect the Arduino to a computer and run simple projects on your Arduino. Once the basics are out of the way, the next 10 chapters of the book focus on small projects centered around particular components, such as LCD displays, stepper motors, or voice synthesizers. Each of these chapters will get you familiar with the technology involved, how to build with it, how to program it, and how it can be used in your own projects.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)

Basic Prototyping

Prototyping is where all of our ideas come to life. When I started working with microcontrollers I really wanted to design and build my whole project and watch it magically work. I realized that all I was doing was overwhelming myself and quickly learned how to break the larger projects into much smaller projects. I could then create prototypes for each of these smaller projects to verify they worked before incorporating them into the larger project.

In this chapter, we will learn:

  • Where to set up a work area
  • All about breadboards
  • What Dupont (jumper) cables are
  • How to prototype a project

Prototypes are used to prove the specifications for a working concept or process rather than theoretical ones. Prototypes, as we are referring to it in this book, is a model to test a concept or process. Prototyping is the process of creating and testing the prototypes.

When...