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Arduino – Beginners

Arduino Tutorials

What is an Arduino? Click here to find out.

Official Tutorials: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/HomePage

Absolute Beginner’s guide to Arduino: http://forefront.io/a/beginners-guide-to-arduino/

We are going to start our journey into Arduino programming by doing the “Basics” tutorials and a few of the “Digital” tutorials:

1. Basics
  • Bare Minimum: The bare minimum of code needed to start an Arduino sketch.
  • Blink: Turn an LED on and off.
  • Digital Read Serial: Read a switch, print the state out to the Arduino Serial Monitor.
  • Analog Read Serial: Read a potentiometer, print its state out to the Arduino Serial Monitor.
  • Fade: Demonstrates the use of analog output to fade an LED.
  • Read Analog Voltage: Reads an analog input and prints the voltage to the Serial Monitor.
2. Digital

These tutorials will help you to learn to use the Arduino microcontroller board and to build  circuits using various common electronic components.

What is a breadboard?

First Arduino Assignment – Show me what you can do.

For the first assignment, we are going to hack together some code from a Built-in Example project. You are going to modify the Fade tutorial to light 3 LEDs instead of just the one. You will need to build a modified circuit that uses 3 output pins. Simply connecting 3 LEDs to the one pin will not do at all.

Hint: Read the introduction to the Fade tutorial carefully. Not all pins are created equal.

That’s it. Go! Show your circuit and code to Mr. E when done.

Second Arduino Assignment – Show me what you can do too.

For this assignment, you are going to need to look into the Blink Without Delay example. We want to get rid of that pesky delay() in that fade code you created for the first assignment. So, combine the millis() counter function into your code and remove the delay().

Show your circuit and code to Mr. E when done.

Third Arduino Assignment – Press the Button, don’t bounce.

Now, add a button control that starts and stops your LEDs. So, let’s make that a requirement too. To get this to really work properly, you should check out this code example that makes a button act like a switch to turn an LED on (HIGH) and off (LOW).

Show your circuit and code to Mr. E when done.

Arduino project – Make a traffic light. (Or something different? Ideas are welcome!)

Using what you know, build a circuit and program that:

  1. Has 3 LEDs (Green – Yellow – Red) on a “timer” that cycles each light.
  2. Red and Green must illuminate for 3 seconds, Yellow for one second. There should be no significant time between lights.
  3. There must also be a button that will activate the pedestrian crossing. We will discuss in class how this will affect the lights.

More Arduino Projects

Control a servo with a potentiometer: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Knob

Control Panel: https://www.arduino.cc/en/ArduinoStarterKit/Prj02

Arduino Project Hub: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub

Arduino Programming Course: https://startingelectronics.org/software/arduino/learn-to-program-course/01-program-structure-flow/