Gertz Emily - Environmental Monitoring with Arduino: Building Simple Devices to Collect Data About the World Around Us

Break it down It may be difficult to get a gadget to work correctly the first time. But dont get discouraged! Most of these gadgets didnt work the first time for us, either. What weve found, and what we think will work for you, is to break every gadget down into separate components, typically input and output components. Dont skip the preliminaries Make sure each component works individually before connecting it with others. If its working on its own, it will be much more likely to work when combined into a gadget. Save. Back up. Document.

When it comes to coding, this is our mantra:

Do these three simple things consistently, and when your computer crashes, your laptop falls out of your bag and onto the concrete, or your cat walks across the keyboard, you will be calm in the knowledge that you always have a copy of your work safely stored somewhere else.

Change only one thing at a time

If you decide to make any changes to the code or the design of these gadgets (and we heartily encourage you to do so), we suggest that you change only one thing at a time, and test it before making another change.

This is important because your change may cause the gadget to stop working. If youve made only one change, it will be easy to undo it and return to a working version of the gadget. This allows you to move ahead with confidence, because you know that any glitch is easy to fix.

Mash it up

Weve done our best to design these gadgets in a modular fashion, so that with only a little tweaking, you can swap the the input and output components between them. Want to modify the temperature gadget to output to Pachube rather than a display? Go for it! The hardware should be easy to modify, and changing the code will usually be a simple matter of cutting and pasting from one gadgets code to the next.

Granted, some swaps dont seem to make much sense: it might be rather odd to build a thermometer with an audio output. But give it a try if you want to. Who knows what youll come up with?Heres our own favorite mashup so far: If you combine the audio output of the electromagnetic field detector with the Geiger counter input, and then tweak the code just right, you can make an old-fashioned click-click-click radiation detector, just like in the movies.So mix and match! Have fun! Be bold!

Ask for help

There is absolutely zero shame in asking for help, and there is less than zero shame in asking for help with an Arduino project. The entire Arduino ecosystem is built on a philosophy of open access to knowledge. Some people may know more about building circuits or writing code than you know. You might know more than someone else.

But to a certain extent, no one is an expert, because no one has made Arduino do everything it can do.Whether online or face-to-face, people will be happy to help you learn if youre respectful, gracious, and willing to share. We guarantee that after weeks of feeling like all you ever do is ask questions, there is nothing like the thrill youll get the first time youre able to help someone else solve a problem.

Here are some resources for connecting with fellow Arduino users: