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)

Understanding the first Arduino sketch

Now let us jump into some hands-on activity. In this section we will study an existing Arduino sketch that shipped with the Arduino IDE. The sketch we are going to study is the world famous "blink" program, which is like the Hello World of the embedded programming world. The Arduino IDE installation comes preloaded with a lot of example sketches. All the example sketches are available for use from the File > Examples menu.

Once you attain a minimum level of understanding, you will be able to start exploring more of these examples on your own. Let us inspect and understand the blink program. Fire up the Arduino IDE on your computer and navigate to the File > Examples > 01.Basic > Blink menu. The Blink program will open in a new Arduino IDE window.

The first point to note in the program is the one time configuration that...