Arduino Projects For Dummies

Chapter 1

Exploring the World of Arduino

In This Chapter

Discovering Arduino

Understanding who uses Arduino

Understanding microcontrollers

Understanding Arduino capabilities

You probably wouldn’t have picked up this book if you hadn’t already heard about the “World of Arduino.” You’re probably already a part of it. I think of it as being made up of a community of creative people who are interested in making inanimate stuff do interesting and clever things with computers, programming, and computational thinking — which is just a fancy way of saying “writing recipes.”

Computational thinking means considering problems and their potential solutions and trying to determine the best way to get to those solutions. Usually, it means deciding the best steps to take — and in what order — as well as keeping track of important decisions along the way, or getting the right information you need to make a decision. This could be doing something simple like baking cookies, in which case you probably don’t need a computer. But you can use a little bit of computing power to carry out a simple sequence ...