We live in a wonderful time where we have access to marvelous chunks of technology that inspire our creativity. The personal computer, smart phone, web cam—all of these make our lives easier, but more importantly, more creative. These new inventions invite us to not only become users, but also developers and creators, adding our own adaptions to the wide range of applications available.
This ability for the average person to become a developer is also true in the robotics world. One of the tools that makes this available is Arduino, a processor board that was built to allow almost anyone to create amazing projects with little cost and even less technical expertise. This small, inexpensive, powerful board has been used in a wide range of projects. With its success, has come an entire community of developers who not only provide help in the area of software development, but also provide hardware add-ons and even new form factors for the processor board itself.
It can, however, still be a bit intimidating to start using Arduino in your projects. This book is designed to help anyone, even those with no programming background or experience, be successful in building both simple but also quite complex robotic projects. The book is designed to lead you through the process step by step so that your robotic designs can come to life.
Hopefully, this book will inspire those with the imagination and creative spirit to build those wildly inventive designs that are swirling around in their heads. One day, robots will be as pervasive as cell phones are today. So, start creating!
Chapter 1, Powering on Arduino, covers the selection of the right Arduino board for your project and how to be successful the first time you add power.
Chapter 2, Getting Started with the Arduino IDE, shows you how to download, install, and use the environment for your specific Arduino.
Chapter 3, Simple Programming Concepts Using the Arduino IDE, introduces basic programming constructs and how to use them within the Arduino IDE.
Chapter 4, Accessing the GPIO Pins, shows you the details of how to both send information to as well as get information from the outside world through the available GPIO capabilities.
Chapter 5, Working with Displays, shows you several different types and sizes of displays and also details how to add them to your project.
Chapter 6, Controlling DC Motors, shows you how to connect DC motors for robots that use wheels or tracks to move.
Chapter 7, Controlling Servos with Arduino, shows you how to control servos to build walking robots.
Chapter 8, Avoiding Obstacles Using Sensors, shows you how to add sensors to avoid or, perhaps, find objects.
Chapter 9, Even More Useful Sensors, shows you how to add different types of sensors to your project.
Chapter 10, Going Truly Mobile – the Remote Control of Your Robot, covers how to communicate with your robot wirelessly.
Chapter 11, Using a GPS Device with Arduino, shows you how to add a GPS device so that you always know where your robot is. This is important because if your robot gets truly mobile, it might get lost.
Chapter 12, Taking Your Robot to Sea, shows you some robots that can sail and explore under water.
Chapter 13, Robots That Can Fly, introduces you to robots that can fly.
Chapter 14, Small Projects with Arduino, shows you how to adapt other toy robots using Arduino or add a bit of flash to your current robotic projects using LEDs.
The most important piece of software required for this book is the Arduino IDE, which is available at http://www.arduino.cc/. The only other software that will be required is the software drivers associated with the hardware that you might add to your project; these will be detailed in the individual chapters themselves.
This book is for anyone with a little programming interest, a bit of imagination, and the desire to create their own amazing robotic projects. The book is designed to start by teaching beginners the basics of Arduino and programming. You'll tackle more and more challenging projects until you have the know-how to build your own complex robots that can sail, swim, and fly.
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: "Arduino will then move to the loop() function and begin executing the statements there."
A block of code is set as follows:
// Pin D7 has an LED connected on FLORA.
// give it a name:
int led = 7;
// the setup routine runs once when you press RESET:
void setup() {
// initialize the digital pin as an output.
pinMode(led, OUTPUT);
}
// the loop routine runs over and over again forever:
void loop() {
digitalWrite(led, HIGH); // turn the LED on
delay(100); // wait for a second
digitalWrite(led, LOW); // turn the LED off
delay(1000); // wait for a second
}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: "Select the TFTDisplayText example by navigating to Examples | TFT | Arduino | TFTDisplayText."
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