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I’ve always loved electronics. I did a couple of years of it at college before moving on to other things, but every now and then I keep going back to it. Recently, I’ve been bitten by the bug again and I got out the power supply, breadboard, resistors and multimeter to have a tinker. This time, however, I decided to take the plunge and get either an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi. The Pi seemed like overkill to me. I’m not interested in a mini-computer. I just want something that I can easily control, so I went for the Arduino (Uno) Starter Kit.
The Starter Kit includes everything you need to complete over a dozen Arduino projects. All the projects are in the Arduino book, which is in the box, with the code being in the book also, but available in the IDE (more on that soon). The box has an impressive amount of pieces. Everything from resistors, capacitors, and transistors, through to an LED screen and even a nice wooden mount for your Arduino and (supplied) breadboard.
It doesn’t matter how tiny someone tells you the Arduino is… it’s not until you see it in the flesh that you realize that it’s about half the size of an iPhone/Nexus 5. About the size of a small Post-It notepad.
The whole idea behind the Arduino is that you can hook electronic components up to it, and then, by running some code, you can control those components. Clumps of saved Arduino code are called ‘sketches’. These are prepared using the Arduino IDE – which can be downloaded to your desktop/laptop either from the Arduino site or via your package manager using:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install arduino arduino-core
You write your ‘sketch’ in the IDE, then click the ‘send’ button (the right arrow icon, beside the tick mark). The code is compiled (you see a progress bar), transferred to the Arduino, run on it, and the results are there for all to see.
The supplied projects range from simple (flashing LEDs) through to the more complex ones such as the touchy-feely lamp which requires you to touch a piece of tinfoil.
At almost £70 (€80), the Arduino Starter Kit may seem pricey, but, for what you get, it’s great value for money. The packaging is high quality and very well done. The book has a nice embossed cover, colour throughout; diagrams are very well done (both circuit diagrams and how things should be laid out on the Arduino and breadboard), and written in an easy-to-follow manner. The Arduino board itself is very well made, and with a nice white underside with the Arduino infinity logo. Everything that you’ll be plugging into is marked both on the board an on the side of the sockets. Analogue sockets are marked with the tilde ( ~ ) symbol to remind you of this.
The one minor niggle I have (and the only reason for deducting 0.5 in my rating) is with the style of book. A ring-bound book would have been so much easier to lay flat on the workbench while working through the examples.
From next month onwards, I’m going to document my experiences with the Arduino. Good, or bad, I’ll write a page/two. Not only to solicit help and advice from you folks, but to hopefully give others a taste of how easy/hard it is to use, and work with, the Arduino.
To the workbench!
I bought mine via Amazon (UK), but you can get more information on the Starter Kit (components list), and buy it, from the Arduino (EU) site: http://store.arduino.cc/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2&products_id=185#.U0UX2XWx2ow.