arduino

[Fluroblue]

hay guys does anyone have a good link explaining arduinos? im hearing them everywhere but dont know what they are!

[bitfogav]

you could try the Arduino website

http://www.arduino.cc/

[Chuckt]

Unfortunately, the users on the Arduino sites are ordinary people like you and me. It was created for art students who wanted to make stuff but they aren't all tech savvy. I've asked on the Arduino site before and I still don't know because they don't know and few of their sites can actually tell you how to connect a resonator to their board. The funny thing about electronics is when I get involved in something, I learn there is something else I have to get or do because when you are new you don't know what is involved.

It is because the users aren't tech savvy that people tend to make fun of Arduino but the majority of projects on Hackaday and sites like Adafruit are Arduino. If you really want to know what Arduino is about then apart from their philosophy, you would probably need to check out some of their extensive teaching blogs to find out what it can already do. This is one of their extensive blog sites run independently:

http://tronixstuff.wordpress.com/tutorials/

The philosopy behind Arduino is that it is open source, you can copy and paste code from the internet into a project and you're done. Unfortunately, all learning isn't done by copy and paste and if Atmel was to go bankrupt, what would all the Arduino users do? Would they be able to learn on another microcontroller? Some could.. Some might not.

You will probably need a multimeter if you do your own projects on the Arduino because it is possible to burn it out.

While I don't know a lot about electronics, I bought one because I thought I could bridge the gap and learn on one.

[Chuckt]

you could try the Arduino website

http://www.arduino.cc/

All they could tell me is to buy one because I wouldn't regret it:

http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic ... cseen.html

There are a lot of unanswered questions and one of them just showed me a list of microcontrollers. Society of Robots says that the Arduino isn't really built for Robotics unless you go with the Roboduino. Others say that the Arduino is bad for video unless you have a shield (daughterboard).

Okay. After reading their replies to me, what is an Arduino? I couldn't tell by what they told me

[Chuckt]

hay guys does anyone have a good link explaining arduinos? im hearing them everywhere but dont know what they are!

There is an experimentation kit being sold with an Arduino. I found out that its "textbook" is free in .pdf format. You might be able to learn a little about the Arduino from the free .pdf (53.38 Megabytes and / or 36 pages) which is here:

http://ardx.org/src/guide/2/ARDX-EG-ADAF-PRINT.pdf

The kit is here:

ARDX - v1.3 Experimentation Kit for Arduino
http://www.adafruit.com/products/170

It is basically a 30 dollar Arduino with a book and some parts for the total of 85 dollars plus shipping.

[bitfogav]

Nice find, thanks for posting that Chuckt

[brad]

Arduinos are basically a microcontroller built onto a board with easy to access input and output connections and normally a usb port for programming and a power connection. You can then buy pre-made boards that plug into the main arduino board which you can then program to perform different tasks.

An arduino is no different to what we are doing really with our microcontrollers, it's just that all the hardware has been pre-built for you and you just take care of the coding.

(thats my understanding anyway...)