When you go to a store and buy an electronic gizmo, does it ever occur to you that you could make one yourself ? Or even that it would be FUN to make one yourself ?
You have to study electronics, learn what all the components do, and how to control them with a microcontroller. To put the components together, you’ll have to learn how to solder. To program the microcontroller, you’ll have to learn how to code. To make a cool container that holds the electronics, you’ll have to master certain workshop skills.
One bit of technology that makes these dreams not only achievable but enjoyable is the Arduino, a small microcontroller board designed to be easy to learn and a breeze to program. It lets you operate motors and take input from sensors, allowing you to build the project you want to!
The goal of this course is to help you create those projects—not just the gizmo, but the enclosure as well. You’ll learn workshop skills, familiarize yourself with a ton of tools, build stuff. All of these projects use the easy-to-learn Arduino UNO microcontroller.
This course has been a huge of cool things with an Arduino, and the projects in this course are just the beginning.
Good luck and have fun!
WHAT IS ARDUINO
Arduino is an electronics platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software. Arduino boards are able to read inputs, light on a sensor, a finger on a button, or a Twitter message and turn it into an output, activating a motor, turning on an LED, publishing something online.
You can tell your board what to do by sending a set of instructions to the the board. To do so you use the Arduino Software (IDE).
Over the years Arduino has been the brain of thousands of projects, from everyday objects to complex scientific instruments.
Thanks to its simple and accessible user experience, Arduino has been used in thousands of different projects and applications. The Arduino software is easy-to-use for beginners, yet flexible enough for advanced users. It runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Designers and architects build interactive prototypes, musicians and artists use it for installations and to experiment with new musical instruments. Makers, of course, use it to build many of the projects exhibited at the Maker Faire, for example. Arduino is a key tool to learn new things. Anyone, children, hobbyists, artists, programmers can start tinkering.
WHY ARDUINO
The Arduino hardware and software was designed for students, designers, hobbyists, hackers, newbies, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. Arduino can interact with buttons, LEDs, motors, speakers, GPS units, cameras, the internet, and even your smart-phone or your TV! This flexibility combined with the fact that the Arduino software is free, the hardware boards are pretty cheap, and both the software and hardware are easy to learn has led to a large community of users who have contributed code for a huge variety of Arduino-based projects.
WHO IS ARDUINO FOR
Anyone with a computer they can install software on, an Arduino or compatible and the ability to type and click a mouse. That's pretty much the minimum.
You don't need to know a lot of physics or math, and just like an Art Degree isn't required for making art and being creative, you don't need to have a computer science degree. It helps if you're comfortable using computers but that's a skill most people pick up through life.