Getting Started with Arduino

Planning

Let's look at what we want to achieve and what bits and pieces we need. First of all, we need Arduino to be able to connect to the Internet. As the Arduino board has only a USB port, we can't plug it directly into an Internet connection, so we need to figure out how to bridge the two. Usually what people do is run an application on a computer that will connect to the Internet, process the data, and send Arduino some simple bit of distilled information.

Arduino is a simple computer with a small memory; it can't process large files easily, and when we connect to an RSS feed we'll get a very verbose XML file that would require a lot more RAM. We'll implement a proxy to simplify the XML using the Processing language.

Processing

Processing is where Arduino came from. We love this language and use it to teach programming to beginners as well as to build beautiful code. Processing and Arduino are the perfect combination. Another advantage is that Processing is open source and runs on all the major platforms (Mac, Linux, and Windows). It can also generate standalone applications that run on those platforms. What's more, the Processing community is lively and helpful, and you can find thousands of premade example programs.

The proxy does the following work for us: it downloads the RSS feed from makezine.com and extracts all the words from the resulting XML file. Then, going through all of them, it counts the number of times "peace", "love", and "Arduino" appear in the text. With these ...