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

Getting familiar with the sensor


It's now time to write the code for the sensor. Let's output the values of the sensor to Arduinos Serial Monitor and play around with the sensor a little. We are going to use the ping_cm() function from the NewPing library. Other functions of the library are listed at http://playground.arduino.cc/Code/NewPing.

According to the web page the function is explained as follows:

sonar.ping_cm(); Sends a ping, returns the distance in centimeters or 0 (zero) if no ping echo within set distance limit. There are other functions (also called Methods in some cases) that return the distance in inches, or the time it took for the eco to return, mentioned on the webpage.

Let's get coding for our sensor!

#include <NewPing.h> 
 
NewPing sonar(8, 9); 
 
void setup() { 
 Serial.begin(115200); 
} 
 
void loop() { 
  delay(50); 
  int dist = sonar.ping_cm(); 
  Serial.print("Distance: "); 
  Serial.print(dist); &...