Book Image

Arduino for Kids

By : Rishi Gaurav Bhatnagar, Vijay Varada
Book Image

Arduino for Kids

By: Rishi Gaurav Bhatnagar, Vijay Varada

Overview of this book

The mission of this book is to integrate technology with the tools that children already use for crafts so that they feel that the technology is an extension of their playtime. We use coding, sensors, and micro-controllers integrated with art and craft supplies, origami, and Playdough. There are 10 fun-filled chapters that talk to children directly, and give clear instructions for non-technical parents too. We use Arduino as the controller of choice due to its easy availability and large community. By the end of the book, children will comfortably be able to set up their Arduino, read and understand code, manipulate code, and ultimately write their own code for projects. They will also be able to use basic sensors and know how components connect to each other. All the learning takes place with lots of colorful pictures and the circuits are neatly presented using wiring.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Arduino for Kids
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Inside the working of a microcontroller


What happens inside a microcontroller almost looks like magic. Think about it for a second: an Arduino Uno is executing 125,000 instructions per second. It is that fast! You may ask what an instruction is. Every line written in code is basically an instruction for the core processor of the microcontroller. So when we say digitalRead(), that is an instruction.

Let's take an analogy to understand how a microcontroller works.

There are worms on the earth. Each worm is equivalent to an instruction or an operation that needs to be done.

There is a bird in the sky. Bird is going to take these worms to the chicks in the nest.

Chicks (or the core) eat the worms (or execute an operation/instruction). The mother bird has to keep bringing the worms to the chicks. The system is going to be fast when the chicks have already finished eating the worm before the mother bird brings in more worms.

This means that an operation needs to be executed before another operation...