Book Image

Learn Arduino Prototyping in 10 days

By : Kallol Bosu Roy Choudhuri
Book Image

Learn Arduino Prototyping in 10 days

By: Kallol Bosu Roy Choudhuri

Overview of this book

This book is a quick, 10-day crash course that will help you become well acquainted with the Arduino platform. The primary focus is to empower you to use the Arduino platform by applying basic fundamental principles. You will be able to apply these principles to build almost any type of physical device. The projects you will work through in this book are self-contained micro-controller projects, interfacing with single peripheral devices (such as sensors), building compound devices (multiple devices in a single setup), prototyping standalone devices (powered from independent power sources), working with actuators (such as DC motors), interfacing with an AC-powered device, wireless devices (with Infrared, Radio Frequency and GSM techniques), and finally implementing the Internet of Things (using the ESP8266 series Wi-Fi chip with an IoT cloud platform). The first half of the book focuses on fundamental techniques and building basic types of device, and the final few chapters will show you how to prototype wireless devices. By the end of this book, you will have become acquainted with the fundamental principles in a pragmatic and scientific manner. You will also be confident enough to take up new device prototyping challenges.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Finishing touches

We are almost done with our first standalone device prototype. Just two more things remain:

  • A power switch
  • A project enclosure

A simple power switch will be used to switch the power supply to the device ON and OFF. There are various types of power switches and numerous options to choose from. In order to make our selection easier, we should know that there are mainly two types of power switches:

  • Momentary switches
  • Maintained switch

Momentary switches are the common push button switches that we have seen so far. Recall the push button that we used in Chapter 3, Day 1 - Building a Simple Prototype. The main feature of a momentary switch is that it remains in a closed state (stays ON) as long as the button on the switch remains pressed (technically known as switch Actuation); at all other times, the momentary switch remains in an open state (remains OFF). Momentary...