Name: Getting Started with Arduino
ISBN: 9781449309879

Getting Started with Arduino

The Arduino Hardware The Arduino board is a small microcontroller board, which is a small circuit (the board) that contains a whole computer on a small chip (the microcontroller). This computer is at least a thousand times less powerful than the MacBook I’m using to write this, but it’s a lot cheaper and very useful to build interesting devices. Look at the Arduino board: you’ll see a black chip with 28 “legs”—that chip is the ATmega168, the heart of your board. We (the Arduino team) have placed on this board all the components that are required for this microcontroller to work properly and to communicate with your computer. There are many versions of this board; the one we’ll use throughout this book is the Arduino Duemilanove, which is the simplest one to use and the best one for learning on. However, these instructions apply to earlier versions of the board, including the more recent Arduino Diecimila and the older Arduino NG. The figure on the left below shows the Arduino Duemilanove; The figure on the right shows the Arduino NG. Product Description This valuable little book offers a thorough introduction to the open-source electronics prototyping platform that's taking the design and hobbyist world by storm. Getting Started with Arduino gives you lots of ideas for Arduino projects and helps you get going on them right away. From getting organized to putting the final touches on your prototype, all the information you need is right in the book.

What Hacker News says

qbasic_foreverMay 2023

Check out a getting started with Arduino book or online tutorial series.

You're going to get a ton of answers from people that point you at all kinds of different boards and hardware to learn from, but IMHO nothing is as well documented and easily available as classic Arduino hardware (like the Arduino Uno) and its ecosystem of libraries and programs/sketches. Everything you learn from Arduino will help you the further you get into embedded programming and hardware fun.

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andyidsingaNov 2013

its a good point about arduino being easier for hw dev than some of the other boards out there. Once you slap a full OS like linux on a device writing high level software is easier and very low level hacking becomes an exercise in operating systems and drivers etc etc and not a quick weekend long project controlling servos and whatnot.

I was particularly impressed with the approach of the Getting Started with Arduino book - for artists / non-electronics / non-programmers.

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iqsterSep 2012

May I suggest you take a look at Make: Electronics, Making things talk, and Making things see. The Make folks also have a set of smaller books: Getting Started With Arduino, Getting Started with Processing, etc. These books are written in a very accessible manner (though not necessarily comprehensive).

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SwisherFeb 2012

Instructables.com has a great Arduino section. There are many example projects included with the Arduino software as well as on their site. The getting started with Arduino/Processing books are great also.

http://arduino.cc/hu/Tutorial/HomePage http://processing.org/learning/gettingstarted/

I have yet to come across a project that I want to build that someone has not at least started coding. It makes it very easy to modify/merge others codes/schematics to suit what you are trying to do.

The firmata stuff is very interesting also...makes it easy to interface Processing GUI's with the Arduino.

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r_transpose_pMar 2023

Music aside, I believe the first place I saw a copy of this old zine illustration was in the book "Getting Started with Arduino" by Massimo Banzi (page 10 if you're curious : https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Arduino-Electronics-P... )

Obviously the authors of the Arduino book were reprinting it because they'd seen it somewhere else, where, in turn, it had been copied because someone else had seen it in another source, etc.

But I thought it was extremely poetically true to put that illustration in the Arduino book. That made sense to me.

Now form a band!

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marcan_42Jan 2022

I wish the Arduino IDE actually tried to be educational instead of just being a dumbed down wrapper around avr-gcc with automatic #includes. There are so many things that could be done... stuff like showing side by side disassembly of functions, with register names displayed symbolically. Or even just basic IDE stuff, like built in contextual function documentation.

And then it should have an "export self-contained project" feature that gives you a directory containing a Makefile and all the dependencies to build your .ino, as source code form (and none of the ones you don't use), so you can easily see exactly what is getting built under the hood and can use that as a bridge to working outside the ecosystem. At the scale of 8-bit micros there's no reason not to work with copies of your dependencies, and it's very educational seeing everything in one place (and being able to hack on it) instead of having it scattered in a bunch of global package paths.

The frameworks and libraries are useful (if opaque and quirky and underdocumented), but the IDE is just so underwhelming... heck, it doesn't even manage to be a decent text editor.

Getting started with Arduino makes total sense, nobody's expecting newcomers to start off with the IC datasheet... but they should be able to eventually read the parts they need and work with it directly, instead of relying only on software abstractions. That's the beauty of these systems.

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