Chapter 1, Power on – Arduino Basics, will teach you to connect, install, and transfer the first program to the Arduino board. This chapter covers the basics of how to use the Arduino board, the types of boards, and how to use the Arduino IDE.

Chapter 2, Blinking LEDs, covers one of the basic uses of Arduino, controlling LEDs. Various types and implementations have been covered, RGB LEDs, blinking and fading LEDs, 7-segment displays, or more advanced control techniques.

Chapter 3, Working with Buttons, will show you how to detect and use buttons as a key input method. Several types of buttons have been covered along with solutions to the most common button implementation issues. Also, ways of connecting more buttons than available digital pins have been shown.

Chapter 4, Sensors, covers the most important sensors that can be connected to the Arduino. Probably the most important thing for Arduino is to be able to read as many parameters from the environment as possible. Using sensors, it can read distance, temperature, light intensity, or even global localization.

Chapter 5, Motor Control, will show you how to connect and control multiple types of motors. Making things move is incredibly easy using motors and Arduino. Small and large, brushless and servos motor along with speed and direction control, have all been covered here.

Chapter 6, More Output Devices, talks about getting more out of Arduino. This chapter covers how to control different loads, how to make sound, how to isolate and protect the board, and how to command more outputs.

Chapter 7, Digital Communication with Arduino, covers several communication protocols such as UART, I2C, Serial, and Ethernet, to get the most out of the communication interfaces available on Arduino. Arduino can communicate with other boards, computers, and even the Internet.

Chapter 8, Hacking, talks about the small hacks that can help an Arduino design go further. It includes speeding up the PWM, reacting to external interrupts, or even storing data inside the Arduino forever.

Appendix, Electronics – the Basics, covers the basics of electronics, such as breadboards, Ohm's law, and so on.

In general, for the recipes in this book you will need the following items:

Some of the more focused recipes require specific hardware components in order to implement them. This is a list of specific components required per chapter:

Chapter 2, Blinking LEDs:

Chapter 3, Working with Buttons:

Chapter 4, Sensors:

Chapter 5, Motor Control:

Chapter 6, More Output Devices:

Chapter 7, Digital Communication with Arduino:

Chapter 8, Hacking:

If you want to build programming and electronics projects that interact with the environment, this book will offer you dozens of recipes to guide you through all the major applications of the Arduino platform. It is intended for programming or electronics enthusiasts who want to combine the best of both worlds to build interactive projects.

This book contains the following sections:

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "In the loop() function, we first print the half Christmas tree."

A block of code is set as follows:

if (logFile) {
    logFile.print(val1); // Write first value
    logFile.print(" "); // Write a space
    logFile.println(val2); // Write second value
    logFile.close(); // close the file
  }

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: " To easily find information about a card, run the Arduino IDE built-in example found under File | Examples | SD | CardInfo."

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To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to <[email protected]>, and mention the book title via the subject of your message.

If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.

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