In my latest article, I was explaining how simple Arduino was, which was one of the main reason why AllWize was using it for its IoT development kit. So I challenged myself to learn how to play with this technology, learning electronics and coding at the same time, in a 8h class.
Remember, I studied politics, I haven’t done any kind of physics or maths in years. Not to mention that the class was in Catalan, a language I don’t speak… Let’s say that I was starting from 0 🤯!
Ok, I exaggerate the teacher was translating to me afterwards…
SPOILER: You will NOT learn about how to use Arduino in this article 😬!
Bringing back some electronics memories
So as I explained in the other article, with Arduino you can create electronic circuits and control them with a computer program. Arduino has simplified so much the process of creating circuit boards that you can create an electronic circuit in a minute. No need for any kind of weld, you just need plug components to the board. Just remember that it goes from + to - . Voilà!
The first step of this course was then to create simple electrical circuit to light a LED (pretty easy!). However, quite soon we were already creating much more complicated circuits, with buttons, parallel circuits and finally the prototype of a traffic light 😰. You Arduino maker, do not make fun of me.
Programming like a boss
Now that we could control the circuit in the physical world we started controlling it in the digital world by programming it. With Arduino, you simply connect your board with a USB to your computer (not that simple actually, my brand new laptop didn’t have a USB plug, thank you Apple 😓). After downloading the Arduino IDE, you can start programming the device.
Of course, for someone having no experience in programming, I didn’t find this that easy as I had to catch up with all the logic behind it and get used to language programming. The tasks were to programme the device so that the LED blinks when pushing the button, create a traffic light and pedestrian light with LEDs to work simultaneously or also to control a LED depending on light intensity thanks to a light sensors.
Surprisingly, the learning curve is quite quick. This class was for beginners so we didn’t make any sort of IoT device, which is for more advanced levels. Nevertheless, it showed me that even in 8h class you can already discover so much with Arduino and already start to play with it.
In this article was not meant to promote Arduino per se but rather to explicit the fact that AllWize has chosen to create its devices with Arduino to make the devices as easy as possible to use to create prototypes super quickly.
I hope you liked to read about this geeky adventure 🤓!
Thanks to Felix, a very good and very patient teacher of the Cibernarium. He is also a talented biotronic artiste, check his website here.