Simon Monk - The TAB Book of Arduino Projects: 36 Things to Make with Shields and Proto Shields

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To my son Matthew

Dr. Simon Monk (Preston, UK) has a degree in cybernetics and computer science and a Ph.D. in software engineering. He spent several years as an academic before he returned to industry, co-founding the mobile software company Momote Ltd. He has been an active electronics hobbyist since his early teens and is a full-time writer on hobby electronics and open-source hardware. Dr. Monk is the author of numerous electronics books, specializing in open-source hardware platforms, especially Arduino and Raspberry Pi. He is also co-author with Paul Scherz of Practical Electronics for Inventors, Third Edition.

You can follow him on Twitter, where he is @simonmonk2.

I am very grateful to my son Stephen, the musician of the family, for his help with the Sound and Music section of the book.

T his book contains 36 Arduino projects. Some are easy to make, whereas others require some expertise with a soldering iron. You do not need a strong grounding in electronics engineering to build these projects. Although you will find some theoretical explanations, this is primarily a book that shows you in detail how to make the Arduino projects that it contains.

Some experience with a soldering iron will be helpful. The only tools you will need are screwdrivers, pliers, snips, and a soldering set.

Arduino has become the most popular open-source hardware for building your own microcontroller projects. There are many reasons for this:

Low cost ($25 or less)

Cross-platform (you can use it with PC, Mac, or Linux)

Simple to program

Ready-made plug-in shields that add hardware such as Ethernet, liquid-crystal display (LCD) screens, and so on

Active and helpful community

Probably the two most common Arduino boards in use are the Arduino Uno and the Arduino Leonardo ().

FIGURE I-1 Arduino Uno.

FIGURE I-2 Arduino Leonardo.

There are pros and cons for each board. The Leonardo is a little cheaper and can do some tricks, such as impersonating a USB keyboard or mouse, that the Uno is not capable of. However, the Leonardo is a newer device, and there are some computability problems with older shields and libraries. However, most of the projects in this book will work with the Leonardo. In fact, a few of the projects in this book will only work with the Leonardo because they use the USB keyboard impersonation feature. Refer to the start of each project to check for compatibility or otherwise with different Arduino boards.

The Arduino Uno is a more common board. It is more expensive, but it does have a removable processor chip, which gives the advantage that should you accidentally short an output pin and destroy the processor chip, you can buy a new one for a few dollars. If you do that to a Leonardo, you will need to buy a new Leonardo.

If you get advanced in your Arduino project making, you can take a programmed processor from an Arduino Uno and build it onto a custom printed circuit board (PCB) or stripboard and then replace the processor chip with a new one for the next project. Again, this is not possible with the Leonardo.