Arduino Tutorial

Introduction

So, I get two or three emails a day, all basically asking the same thing: “Where can I learn about electronics?” In general, most of these people have seen some of my projects and want to be able to build similar things. Unfortunately, I have never been able to point them to a good site that really takes the reader through a solid introduction to microcontrollers and basic electronics.

Lesson Plan

Follow these lessons for happiness and prosperity.

• Lesson 0:
  Pre-flight check…Is your Arduino and computer ready?
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• Lesson 1:
  The “Hello World!” of electronics, a simple blinking light
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• Lesson 2:
  Sketches, variables, procedures and hacking code
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• Lesson 3:
  Breadboards, resistors and LEDs, schematics, and basic RGB color-mixing
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• Lesson 4:
  The serial library and binary data – getting chatty with Arduino and crunching numbers
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• Lesson 5:
  Buttons & switches, digital inputs, pull-up and pull-down resistors, if/if-else statements, debouncing and your first contract product design.
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• Lesson 6:
  LEDs in more detail, Kirchoff’s Voltage Law, Ohm’s Law and a peek at the potentiometer
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Credits and other links

To some extent, the structure of the material borrows from:
The impressively good “What’s a microcontroller?” book (& now PDF) by Parallax.
It’s for BASIC Stamps but is still a good read even if you don’t plan to use Stamps.

“Spooky Arduino” – Todbot’s excellent (if fast-paced!) class on Arduino projects for Halloween.