Book Image

Arduino for Kids

By : Rishi Gaurav Bhatnagar, Vijay Varada
Book Image

Arduino for Kids

By: Rishi Gaurav Bhatnagar, Vijay Varada

Overview of this book

The mission of this book is to integrate technology with the tools that children already use for crafts so that they feel that the technology is an extension of their playtime. We use coding, sensors, and micro-controllers integrated with art and craft supplies, origami, and Playdough. There are 10 fun-filled chapters that talk to children directly, and give clear instructions for non-technical parents too. We use Arduino as the controller of choice due to its easy availability and large community. By the end of the book, children will comfortably be able to set up their Arduino, read and understand code, manipulate code, and ultimately write their own code for projects. They will also be able to use basic sensors and know how components connect to each other. All the learning takes place with lots of colorful pictures and the circuits are neatly presented using wiring.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Arduino for Kids
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Hi Computer, I’m Arduino! - Using serial communication to make your Arduino talk


The Arduino is no baby that just crawls around and blinks LED’s. You can program it to speak!

We will see how to use the Arduino’s Serial library to have the Arduino talk to the computer over the USB port.

Let’s begin by making it clear that we aren’t talking about tasty breakfast while talking about Serial. Serial communication is a type of “protocol” or a procedure by which information and data is sent one after another “bit by bit” instead of all at once. A bit is the fundamental building block of digital data, consisting of a 0 or a 1.

You need not to worry about the inner working of the protocol itself, but the end-result it can accomplish: Sending messages and data back and forth from the Arduino to a computer or even other hardware and Arduinos. Let us consider communicating between a computer and Arduino for now since we will be using it extensively in the book.

Let us understand Serial Communication Library...