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)

Light up LED

Now that we have discussed the basics of electrical circuits, let's build our first circuit. In this circuit, we will simply light up a LED. We will start off with a look at the schematic diagram, which will tell us how to build the circuit:

In this diagram, we can see that the circuit consists of one 9-volt power source (9-volt battery) one LED and one resistor. One of the first questions people new to circuits ask is how we calculate the value of the resistor. To calculate this value, we need to know what the forward voltage for the LED is and the maximum current it can take without blowing. The forward voltage is the voltage amount required before the LED will conduct electricity and the voltage drop that will occur. If you purchase the LED from a good electronic store, they should have a datasheet that will tell you the forward voltage and the maximum current...