Frank Greig, Napier University and friends
(Live capture of practical session)
Arduino: System on a Chip, Microcontroller (MCU) and Single Board Computers
Cost of an Arduino <£20. Tools such as Processing and Fritzing are free. Components (e.g. Breadboards, LEDs etc.) are cheap. Community support abundant. Should be up and running in 20 minutes.
Fritzing allows you to draw the diagrams to set up exercises. Open source, free download. Code development: can get a version of Scratch for Arduino which acts as a good transition into Arduino C code.
During session, I did manage to get blinking LED within a few minutes. This what I like about control. You write some code (software that exists in the magical world of the computer) but control technology makes stuff happen in the real world. Somehow I find this stupidly exciting! (And that's a good thing!)
We added a resister to the breadboard but good advice was to solder the resistor onto the LED.
Moved onto switching an LED on and off by covering up a photocell sensor. When it got dark, a light came on. Again, stupidly satisfying! After this, we saw a Bluetooth modem attached to an Arduino and a Bluetooth terminal app that can send serial data over Bluetooth. The chap from Napier then controlled a line of LEDs from his phone - phone controlled Christmas tree lights.
Some really nice video lessons on what you can do with sensors (e.g. £1 range sensor used to measure colour and position).
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