The Arduino Inventors Guide

Daniel Hienzsch is the founder of Rheingold Heavy, which delivers educational content and materials to electronics enthusiasts and students. He previously worked in IT for 20 years, including 10 years as the IT director for an investment bank. Dan is passionate about education, and Rheingold Heavy is his effort to provide the maker community with materials he wished he had when he was first getting started in electronics and technology. He is also a certified scuba instructor.

Although I am a formally trained engineer (I went to school to study electrical engineering), my education focused a lot on theory, simulations, and modeling, and I was never taught how to solder, machine, or really build things. After graduating from college, I worked as an engineer during the week, and found myself volunteering at the Science Museum of Minnesota on the weekends. It was at the museum where I discovered my love of teaching. I was given the opportunity to inspire children to be curious, ask questions, and wonder about the world. My experiences in the museum set me on a course to change careers, pursue a masters in education, and become a high school physics teacher.

Derek and I complement each others experience and background. This book is a culmination of both of our experiences in teaching and in learning how best to use Arduino in the classroom. As Derek puts it, the Arduino is simply another material that we use in our projects. The faculty and students at NYUs Integrated Telecommunications Program (ITP) have long known this. The way you interact with electronics changes immediately when you enclose or cover them. Even something as simple as using a ping-pong ball to diffuse an LED immediately affects your interaction with the project. The way the light diffuses and blends through materials teases your emotions in a way that you wouldnt get with just an LED in a breadboard.

Weve put a lot of thought into how to make learning electronics and programming accessible for anyone. We hope that these projects will help to unleash your inner inventor!

Unlike Brian, I have no formal background in electronics or computer programming; I am completely self-taught. I learned Arduino so that I could give my students access to a technology they could control and build with. I was a middle school technology teacher asked to dream up a shop class for the 21st century. Electronics was part of that vision, and over a three-year process, Arduino (and, later, the Processing language) took center stage in my classroom. I learned electronics and programming so that I could teach it in my class.

Many of these projects come directly from my classroom experience teaching Arduino. My students learned computer science and electronics out of necessity, in order to develop their ideas rather than have a teacher telling them because you need to. I hope that my contribution to this book honors my students and puts electronics and programming into a format that sparks your imagination.