Blink the LED We’ll start programming the Arduino! In this chapter, we are going to start to see how the Arduino controls electronics with the programs that we write. First we’ll set up the software to program the Arduino on a computer, then we’ll connect your Arduino to a breadboard. We’ll build an SOS signal […]
Read More →Downloading the Arduino IDE: getting started The IDE we will use to program our Arduino is free and available on the Arduino site. The installation procedure is slightly different for the Mac platform than for the Windows platform, we’ll walk you through download and installation for both of them. Here’s the URL where you can […]
Read More →Parts of the IDE: understanding the code window We’ve heard about the parts of the Arduino IDE, now let’s take a look at them more closely. As in most software, there are menus that allow you to perform various actions, such as creating new files, saving them and many more at the top of the […]
Read More →Debugging: what do I do if the LED is not blinking? If your LED is blinking and the upload worked, move on to the next page. But what if the LED didn’t light up? Just like we used Debugging to search out any issues in our hardware and circuits, we will do the same throughout […]
Read More →ATG3_Blink Sketch: an overview Here’s a screenshot of what the ATG3_Blink sketch looks like. We’ll go over every part of it in detail, this is a quick overview of the parts of the sketch. Comments are notes to the programmer in the text that are not part of your program. In an Arduino sketch, setup […]
Read More →setup(): setting initial conditions We’ve gotten past the comments, and have seen that setup runs once at the beginning, whenever we turn on or reset the Arduino. Let’s now take a in depth look at the setup function in the ATG3_Blink example sketch we loaded: Setup has some parantheses attached to it: we will explain […]
Read More →A schematic of the Arduino Now that we’ve run our code and lit the LED on the Arduino board, we’re going to attach our Arduino to a breadboard, build a circuit and run our ATG3_Blink sketch again. We want to learn how to control external components with our Arduino, not just light up an LED […]
Read More →Building the basic circuit Now that we’ve taken a look at the schematic, let’s build. We are going to run our ATG3_Blink sketch and light up an LED on a breadboard. The circuit we’re going to build first is similar to what we have already built on the breadboard in chapter 2. We are attaching […]
Read More →SOS signal light: creating more complex timing While the previous circuit ended up being very similar to the project in chapter 2, we have accomplished something by now hooking it up to Arduino and the possibilities of code. Earlier in this chapter, we saw that we can make one light blink on and off with […]
Read More →