Getting Started with Arduino

Want to create devices that interact with the physical world? This cookbook is perfect for anyone who wants to experiment with the popular Arduino microcontroller and programming environment. You’ll find more than 200 tips and techniques for building a variety of objects and prototypes such as toys, detectors, robots, and interactive clothing that can sense and respond to touch, sound, position, heat, and light.

You don’t need to have mastered Arduino or programming to get started. Updated for the Arduino 1.0 release, the recipes in this second edition include practical examples and guidance to help you begin, expand, and enhance your projects right away—whether you’re an artist, designer, hobbyist, student, or engineer.

• Get up to speed on the Arduino board and essential software concepts quickly
• Learn basic techniques for reading digital and analog signals
• Use Arduino with a variety of popular input devices and sensors
• Drive visual displays, generate sound, and control several types of motors
• Interact with devices that use remote controls, including TVs and appliances
• Learn techniques for handling time delays and time measurement
• Apply advanced coding and memory handling techniques

After the devastating tsunami in 2011, DYIers in Japan built their own devices to detect radiation levels, then posted their finding on the Internet. Right now, thousands of people worldwide are tracking environmental conditions with monitoring devices they’ve built themselves. You can do it too!

This inspiring guide shows you how to use Arduino to create gadgets for measuring noise, weather, electromagnetic interference (EMI), water purity, and more. You’ll also learn how to collect and share your own data, and you can experiment by creating your own variations of the gadgets covered in the book. If you’re new to DIY electronics, the first chapter offers a primer on electronic circuits and Arduino programming.

• Use a special microphone and amplifier to build a reliable noise monitor
• Create a gadget to detect energy vampires: devices that use electricity when they’re “off”
• Examine water purity with a water conductivity device
• Measure weather basics such as temperature, humidity, and dew point
• Build your own Geiger counter to gauge background radiation
• Extend Arduino with an Ethernet shield—and put your data on the Internet
• Share your weather and radiation data online through Pachube

If you want to experiment with radio frequency identification (RFID), this book is the perfect place to start. All you need is some experience with Arduino and Processing, the ability to connect basic circuits on a breadboard with jumper wire—and you’re good to go. You’ll be guided through three hands-on projects that let you experience RFID in action.

RFID is used in various applications, such as identifying store items or accessing a toll road with an EZPass system. After you build each of the book’s projects in succession, you’ll have the knowledge to pursue RFID applications of your own.

• Use Processing to get a sense of how RFID readers behave
• Connect Arduino to an RFID reader and discover how to use RFID tags as keys
• Automate your office or home, using RFID to turn on systems when you’re present, and turn them off when you leave
• Get a complete list of materials you need, along with code samples and helpful illustrations
• Tackle each project with easy-to-follow explanations of how the code works

Build a robot that responds to electrical activity in your brain—it’s easy and fun. If you’re familiar with Arduino and have basic mechanical building skills, this book will show you how to construct a robot that plays sounds, blinks lights, and reacts to signals from an affordable electroencephalography (EEG) headband. Concentrate and the robot will move. Focus more and it will go faster. Let your mind wander and the robot will slow down.

You’ll find complete instructions for building a simple robot chassis with servos, wheels, sensors, LEDs, and a speaker. You also get the code to program the Arduino microcontroller to receive wireless signals from the EEG. Your robot will astound anyone who wears the EEG headband.

This book will help you:

• Connect an inexpensive EEG device to Arduino
• Build a robot platform on wheels
• Calculate a percentage value from a potentiometer reading
• Mix colors with an RGB LED
• Play tones with a piezo speaker
• Write a program that makes the robot avoid boundaries
• Create simple movement routines