Give Us One Minute

I’m not sure where I first heard about the Arduino micro-controller (it was probably in the pages of Make Magazine), but I’ve been hooked on this little piece of open source electronics ever since. It’s also been a great tool for instruction. Beginning this week, I am using the board to demonstrate micro-controller programming to my C-Programming course students. Since the Arduino software is loosely based on C, it’s make the perfect training tool to allow my students to experience physical computing programming which is much more interesting than PC based programming (IMHO).

I’m not going to go into a long write up about the board since you can learn everything you want to know at the Arduino web site. But I am going to share with you two videos that I produced and placed on YouTube to document my first Arduino board purchase and some basic steps so you can use get your Arudino board connected to your computer and fired up.

This first video is an un-boxing of the Arduino Starter Kit from Adafruit Industries.

In this second video, I direct you to software installation instructions, show you how to connect your Arduino board to your computer, how to upload code to the Arduino and finally show you how to make the Arduino autonomous. There’s also a riddle/challenge at the very end.

Want to learn more advanced Arduino techniques? Check out the book, Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects by Tom Igoe. Before purchasing though, be sure you have at least a basic understanding of programming and electronics. I’ll also be updating this post with new information and/or experiences so be sure to bookmark this page and check back occasionally.

Tags: arduino, microcontroller, Make, electronics, hobby, physical computing