Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Getting Started with Arduino I”.
Welcome to maker faire and welcome to the make electronics stage. My name is andrew terranova, i’m going to be presenting getting started with arduino by show of hands. Who is an expert or considered yourself an expert on arduino? Okay, not very many people, that’s good uh, who considers yourself a brand new, totally new to arduino, okay you’re at the right presentation and uh and who is sort of, maybe intermediate knows a little enough to be dangerous at arduino. Okay, that’s me good. So as long as i know more than you we’re cool so uh, if you don’t know too much about arduino, what’s it good for well just about anything, you want it’s a microprocessor, it gets. It has inputs and outputs and i’ll explain a little bit about that.
But what it means is, you can monitor something on your inputs run a little program to do something with that and then have an output. So you can use it for prototyping and making circuits that do do cool programmable things. You can hack and turn junk into cool stuff, and of course, you can actually learn how to program. Instead of just you know, hello, world or whatever. You can actually make something cool and so you’re building a project and programming it and learning how to program.
At the same time, so, for example, these are just a few examples of things. People have done, there’s the monkey couch guardian. You know it senses that somebody comes close to the couch and then it reacts by doing the the clappy clappy thing right. Um. I always found that thing’s, a little scary or you can have like a gumball machine instead of putting a coin in you get a secret knock. It recognizes the patterns and that’s your input and then the output. Is it actuates a little electron electric solenoid and opens the gumball drawer and you get a gumball input, processing, output or uh? You can actually log data too, so you can do it for learning and scientific and education stuff. This is a sun logger.
You can collect, you know, uh the amount of uh solar radiation over the course of the day right. But those are just a few examples you can do just about anything you want. How do you learn about arduino? There’S a lot of great resources to learn. Arduino arduino zone website is a really good resource. Arduino dot cc they’ve got a great reference. That’S i often refer back to it myself. We also have in the maker shed which you’ll find uh here at maker faire uh a couple of good books on uh making on using arduino there’s a getting started.
Kit four arduino ends at 12 30 today, only michael arduino, the author of make an arduino controlled robot, has his own presentation on learning arduino using robots. So that’s a great presentation, okay, so what does an arduino look like? There are a few different makes. There’S a few different models: uh. These are like sort of the four main ones that you’ll see the uno, uh, the leonardo and the the mega and the deway. So the difference, let me break it down for you. Basically, the uno is a good starting board to go with it’s got. It’S got 14 digital input and output pins right.
So let me explain digital analog. If you want to know if something is on or off or you want to turn something on or off that’s digital, it’s either a one or a zero, nothing in between analog. If you want to know a range of numbers like how bright is the sun as opposed to, is there light here? Okay, then that’s analog or how loud is the sound right, analog they’re, only analog inputs, digital.
You have input and output on the arduino uh. So one of the important things when you’re trying to pick which board do i go with because there’s a lot of them is how many inputs and outputs do i need for whatever i want to do so. The arduino is a nice. You know as a nice starting point like i said: 14 digital inputs and outputs, six analog inputs, and it runs at 16 megahertz blah blah blah. The mega is a good choice. If you have a lot of, i o a lot of inputs and outputs, it’s got. 54, digital inputs and outputs 16 analog inputs, and then, when i said you couldn’t really have an analog output, it’s sort of a lie. You could have fifth there’s 15 of what you called pwm or pulse width modulation. It’S really digital, but it’s putting out pulses.
Instead of just on or off it’s pulses of on so the more pulses of on you do the more it looks like it’s only a little bit on so, for example, if you had a an led – and you just turn it on full bright, it’s on. If you pulse on, then it’s a little dimmer and how many? However many pulses you do in a certain time period. That’S pulse width modulation, so you can make a led brighter or dimmer with pulse width, modulation or pwm. So that’s what that’s about! Okay, the other two on here you see are the duae and the leonardo, the duet.
They have different processors, different technology behind them, they’re all um uh, the dua is actually an atmel. I don’t want to go into the processor names it’s too much, but the dua also has a lot of input. Output. 15, digital uh, 12 analog.
The leonardo has 20 digital and 12 analog uh. The other thing about the leonardo is: has a built-in usb support and uh some shields. Okay, does anybody know what a shield is? Nobody knows his shield is a shield is like an add-on board and that’s what in arduino you’ll hear this term shield i’ll talk about it more later, but basically it’s an add-on board that slides right on top of it and it adds functionality. So some shields with the leonardo that depend on um certain protocols won’t work with the leonardo. So that’s something to check the duet.
The other thing about that is um. It’S a 3.3 volt board. The rest of them are all five volt boards, so where this comes into play is if you’re interfacing to something that runs on five volts and you have a 3.3 volt board.
You could blow it up. So don’t do that um! Okay, a little bit more! There are some new family members to arduino um. On the one side, we have the arduino robot, that’s a new thing uh, so it’s a onboard got an arduino built onto it and it’s an actual robot kit and the other one is the yoon, which is a new thing as well. I’M not going to go into too much detail, but it adds wi-fi capability and it’s actually got a bridge between sort of a unix linux, running side and an arduino running side, and it’s for sale for the first time in the u.s here at the maker shed. So that’s kind of brandy, new, okay, so in case that wasn’t confusing enough. There are a few other choices: there’s the explora, the arduino ethernet, the lily pad the micro, the nano, the mini, the pro the pro mini and the fio.
Everybody got that no okay um. Basically, what the thing to know about these boards are, if you have a very specific project, so, for example, the lily pad has a nice little round form factor it’s great for, like sewing onto a wearable, a badge or a piece of clothing. The explora is similar to the leonardo, but it has built-in sensors.
So if you want to just get started real quick, you can go with that built in ethernet capability go with the ethernet, so you would only look at these boards if you have a specific need. Uh, if you just want to sort of get get started, quick, the uno or one of the other ones, a great start: okay, here’s the arduino. In brief, this is the uno. It’S got a reset button, your digital io pins. I talked about those those are along.
The top the long chip – that’s the brain on the bottom. You have your power and analog pins where you get like a input, analog inputs and then uh. You can get power either from your computer on the usb or through a plug-in like dc power wall converter shields. I talked about those right, there’s all kinds of shields. There’S shields that drive motors there’s shields that drive leds. There’S shields that drive.
You know just a circuit board where you can prototype whatever the heck you want. So you see that word shield look for it. People can also like make their own custom shield. So if you are thinking i want to do this with my project, i wonder if somebody’s ever done, that just search for whatever the heck you’re looking for shield – and it might have already been done – or maybe you want to do it yourself and you just buy A board and do it um to bear a minimum to get started.
Is your computer there’s a a programming interface i’ll, show you in a minute. You need a cable that connects to your arduino and you’re good to go. This is the uh.
This is the environment. It’S a multi-platform, so it’ll run on a different operating systems. Uh you install the software on your laptop, you program it there.
You start up your arduino and then you just push the program into the arduino and as soon as it loads, it starts executing your program. The basic program that, like everybody, has it’s you know it’s like a default is, is um the blink program. So when you first get your board your new board, you load the blank program and it blinks a little onboard led and then you know your your arduino is working and then, if you want to have fun, you change the blink rate or you make it pulse With that pwm function, and then you start to learn how to program if you are not an experienced programmer, if you are an experienced programmer, you know what hello world means. So the blink program is like the hello world of the arduino. This is how you load a sketch um.
You know you it’s very simple, you can pull examples down and you just push it out. That’S basically it that was arduino in like 12 to 14 minutes. Do i have time for questions or yeah.
I have time for a couple of questions um. If anybody has a question – oh one in the back there, okay sure so uh the arduino programming language is very c-like. It’S sort of uh, but what they’ve done is they’ve um, they’ve abstracted a few things and hidden them in libraries and when i say hidden, not very well hidden, it’s like here they are, you can go, look at them. You can mess with them. You can write your own if you want to go, do that, but if you don’t – and you just want to like make your led blink or call a motor, a servo driving library or a motor driving library, somebody might have a library, and there are many many Libraries already written for you, so all that stuff can be hidden or you can dive into it. I’M sorry! I don’t know if that answered your question a little, but we you know anybody else, really all right. Well. Thank you very much. Uh check out michael margolis’s presentation if you like robots and you want to learn arduino in the maker shed stage and again have a great time at maker faire. You .