Arduino Course

Arduino Course for Absolute Beginners Debouncing a Button with Arduino In the last lesson you may have noticed that the button counts weren’t exact – sometimes if you pressed the button once, it would register two or even three presses. Maybe you pressed the button four times in a row and it only registered twice.…

Arduino Course for Absolute Beginners Arduino Code Blink an LED without using the delay() Function I am reminded of the famous idiom “There is more than one way to blink an LED.” Which holds very true for the Arduino platform. You should know at least four ways to blink an LED with your Arduino by…

Arduino Course for Absolute Beginners Arduino Switch Case Statements & Keyboard Input How is it the QWERTY keyboard has been around so long? We used to “hunt & gather” now we “hunt & peck” (or at least I do). It seems the keyboard is a long lasting human interface device that will be around for…

Arduino Course for Absolute Beginners Switch Case Statements Here is a secret about human relations a boss from long ago once told me. If you and your spouse decide to go out to dinner do not ask, “Where do you want to go?” instead, give a list of options, “Do you want to go to…

Arduino Course for Absolute Beginners For Loop Iteration There are few functions so useful that you find them everywhere. The for loop is one of those functions. A for loop repeats an action for a specified number of iterations, reducing the lines of code that need to be written thus making the programmer’s life easier.…

Arduino Course for Absolute Beginners Fade an LED with Pulse Width Modulation Using analogWrite( ) Let’s expand the repertoire of output that we can use by looking at the function analogWrite(). I experienced much confusion with analogWrite(), because I suspected that it had to do with the analog pins on the Arduino. The function, however,…

Arduino Course for Absolute Beginners If Statement (and else-if), Comparison Operators and Conditions In the last lesson, we learned about the if statement. The if statement was the perfect choice for setting up instructions to run only when certain conditions were met. “If 30 seconds has passed – stop the heating element” or “If the…

Arduino Course for Absolute Beginners analogRead() and Serial Port Communications Knowing if something is on or off can be extremely useful, but often you will want to know more. How bright is the light? How fast is the satellite moving? These types of answers are often analog – they cover a large range of values,…

Arduino Course for Absolute Beginners digitalRead() and Serial Port Communication As simple as it may seem, knowing when something is either on or off can be a great tool for designing something useful. This lesson will answer the following questions: Is a button being pressed? Has a switch been turned on? What is the on/off…