Arduino Class

We had a great arduino class on Saturday – it went a lot faster than I expected, and I ran out of things to talk about pretty early. That may have been because we had relatively few problems getting the arduino development software installed for everyone. Cory was a hero for bringing the windows version on a CD, because the network bandwidth went to almost nothing just as we needed a copy.

I meant to talk more about the history of the Arduino project and about open source, but I failed to prepare and didn’t cover it well. Next time I’ll do better.

All the material we covered came from examples supplied with the arduino platform, and they worked for everyone. An unexpected moment that I really enjoyed was when I pulled out the Oscilloscope to show what the Pulse Width Modulated (PWM) signal looked like. This is definitely staying in the class. There were a few notes that I made on the whiteboard, and didn’t give anyone copies to take home. So that there’s no confusion about hooking up the extra parts from the class, I’ve reproduced those notes here on the wiki.

Cory also asked an interesting question about using the arduino to trigger a photographic strobe. I reverted to to bad engineering behavior, and forgot that this was an intro course, and gave an answer that was probably discouraging. I realized I had lost my way when I heard myself saying “interrupt driven”. I’ll attempt to make a topic out of this for this wiki in the next day or so. But – the important thing is to go ahead and try that idea – it’s really easy to mock something up with the arduino platform. In fact, here’s a posting by someone who has played with triggering a strobe, and shared his project. I love sharing.