Paul M0ZMB ran a beginners night with Arduino. This included what is involved in the Arduino ecosystem and how to get started.

The Arduino

Is an open source computer hardware and software company, project, and user community that designs and manufactures single-board microcontrollers and microcontroller kits for building digital devices and interactive objects that can sense and control objects in the physical world.

The Arduino project started in 2003 as a program for students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy, aiming to provide a low-cost and easy way for novices and professionals to create devices that interact with their environment using sensors and actuators.

Since it was started it has grown with other people adding in new things including controller boards and sensor/device boards called shields.

Paul’s bag of tricks.

Paul had been tinkering with the Arduino for a while and previously gave a talk on some of his projects that he had created. From this Paul was asked to create a kit of bits to introduce the basics of what could be done. He created a bag of bits including the NodeMCU controller, a small OLED display, resistors, LED’s, jumper leads, switches and breadboard. All members had to provide was a laptop to run the programming software.

To start with the members had to install the IDE to be able to programme the device.  It also had to be updated to enable the controller that Paul chose. After this we were able to create our first programme called a sketch. This was to blink an LED built on to the controller board. Then finally to blink an external LED, using the bits in the bag.

Paul has created a few more projects to do with increasing complexity.

The time for the evening ran out, with everyone enjoying the evening.

John M0HFH is already think about things he might try and do with the Arduino family!

So this is most definitely to be continued…………….