Neil Cameron - Arduino Applied: Comprehensive Projects for Everyday Electronics

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/978-1-4842-3959-9 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

Microcontrollers are incorporated in car control systems, domestic appliances, office machines, mobile phones, medical implants, remote controls, and the list goes on. The Arduino Uno is a microcontroller board that can be easily programmed and used to build projects. The objective of this book is to provide information to use the Arduino Uno in a range of applications, from blinking an LED to a motion sensor alarm, to route mapping with a mobile GPS system, to uploading information to the Internet. Prior knowledge of electronics is not required, as each topic is described and illustrated with examples using the Arduino Uno.

The book covers a comprehensive range of topics. In Chapters , with the robot car controlled by systems described in earlier chapters.

Projects covered in the book include and extend those in Arduino Uno starter kits to increase knowledge of microcontrollers in electronic applications. Many of the projects are practically orientated, such as information displays, GPS tracking, RFID entry systems, motion detector alarms, and robots. Building projects helps you understand how many electronic applications function in everyday life. Examples include flashing numbers on a screen, a scrolling message in the train station, electronic tags on items in a shop or books in the library, a desktop weather station, Bluetooth communication with a mobile phone, digital sound systems, and an obstacle-avoiding robot vacuum cleaner.

Each example in the book is accompanied by code and a description of that code, which helps you learn how to program a microcontroller and a computer, which is a highly valuable skill. The Arduino programming language is C, which is widely used. Learning to program an Arduino provides the framework for other computer programming languages. Throughout the book, schematic diagrams were produced with Fritzing software ( www.fritzing.org ), with an emphasis on maximizing the clarity of component layout and minimizing overlapping connections. The authors of the libraries used in the book are identified in each chapter, with library details covered in the appendix. There are several approaches to structuring sketches, and the approach taken in the book is to declare variables at the start of the sketch, rather than throughout the sketch.

All the code used in the book is available to download from github.com/Apress/arduino-applied . The Arduino programming environment and libraries are constantly being updated, so information on the consequences of those updates on the content of the book is also available at github.com/Apress/arduino-applied .

Many chapters of the book are stand-alone, so that you can delve into a section of the book rather than having to start from the beginning, while several chapters utilize information from earlier chapters to build a project. You learn how to break down a complex project into smaller projects, just as each chapter addresses a different topic, to then be able to build and enhance the initial project.

If you bought, or are thinking about buying, an Arduino Uno starter kit that contains a few LEDs, a variety of sensors, with some switches and resistors, then this book is for you. If you want to build electronics projects with a microcontroller, then the comprehensive range of topics covered in the book provides the detailed instructions to get started.