Adventures in Arduino

Introduction

ARE YOU AN adventurer? Do you boldly embark on new endeavours, tackling new skills and mastering new tools? Do you want to learn how to use technology to make your ideas burst into life? Are you curious about how you can combine computer code and electrical circuits with scissors and paper—or even needle and thread? If the answer is an emphatic “yes” then this is the book for you!

What Is an Arduino?

The Arduino is a tool for building computers that can interact with the physical world around you. You can use it to connect sensors that detect sound, light or vibration, then turn on a light, change its colour, move a motor and much more. The Arduino is the magical device that sits in the midst of all of these things. It reads in from sensors measuring the real world, makes decisions based on that data and then makes something happen in the real world, whether light, sound or movement.

The Arduino is usually a blue board about the size of your hand. It has white writing on it labelling its different sections and has all its chips and circuits exposed. There are different types of Arduino boards, and they aren’t all blue, but you will learn more about that later in the “Parts You Will Need” section and also in Adventures 7 and 8.

The Arduino is a microcontroller. A microcontroller is a simple computer. It can’t do many things at the same time but it does what it is told to do really well. You already interact with lots of microcontrollers every day because they control ...