Arduino

The Arduino starter kit - so much stuff!

I bought myself an Arduino microcontroller the other week. A microcontroller is part of a computer, but not a computer. You can't run an operating system on it, so it's not like a raspberry pi, but if you want to mess around with electronics then it is super simple to get started.

The Arduino project is pretty cool, it started in Italy, and they have decided to open source everything! All the libraries are available and people are contributing to them. They even open-sourced the hardware, which means there are now heaps of Arduino copies out there, making it really cheap to get into.

It being a microcontroller means you can upload a single program to it and it will run, and that's all it does. You download the IDE (the coding environment), write your program, plug in the Arduino, upload and it immediately starts running. So simple to get started, from unboxing to getting my first flashing light took 10 minutes. That is crazy streamlined.

A raspberry pi can obviously do a lot more, it being a proper computer, but with great power comes great responsibility, and it's a bit more arduous to get flashing lights from a raspberry pi. Though you use python on a raspberry, rather than the C/C++ of Aduino, which if you are a beginner can be an easier language.

I bought the Arduino starter kit, my ultimate goal is to build a robot car, I even have the chassis and some motors, but I'm not really sure how to wire everything up. I thought I would start simple and work my way up. The starter kit comes with so much stuff, I'm sure you could do this yourself, if you research all the components on line, and electronics seem pretty cheap if you are just buying resistors and stuff. But then all the wires I get in the kit are pre-cut and pre-stripped making it super easy to work with a breadboard - no soldering required!

The start of my chassis. I didn't realise you are meant to peel that brown stuff off

I think it's kind of aimed at kids, but I don't care, it is pretty fun building your own stuff. It's a funny feeling being able to build your own stuff. It means it's kind of impossible to break something, I mean sure you can burn out a component, but since you built everything yourself, you know how to replace it and keep going.