Tero Karvinen - Make: Sensors: A Hands-On Primer for Monitoring the Real World with Arduino and Raspberry Pi

Sebastopol

If your interest in electronics started with a desire to quickly learn some basics and then design your own robots, gadgets, or projects, youre in the right place. This book will show you how to go from idea to reality quickly.

Theory, skills, and basics are usefulas long as they serve your creativity. Feel free to experiment with your ideas, and have the courage to publish your results on the Web.

Each chapter presents a mini project to show how you can combine different technologies. For example, youll build a wooden box that you open with a fingerprint and a color-changing chameleon dome. These are fun projects, but also good starting points for things you invent later yourself.

The skills you learn with Arduino are easily applicable to real-lifeprojects. For example, we used Arduino to build the sun sensor prototype for Finlands first satellite ().

Figure 1. Finland launches its first satellite in 2014. We designed and built the sun sensor prototype with Arduino.

When you get an idea, you can quickly build your first prototype with the help of this book. Instead of spending hours with component data sheets, you can simply pick a sensor and use ready-made breadboard diagrams and code. You can use sensors as building blocks for your project, but unlike construction kits such as Meccano or Lego, the possibilities with Arduino and Raspberry Pi are nearly endless.

If you know what you want to measure, you can easily find a sensor for it. The book is arranged by the real-life phenomena you can measure:

You can also use Make: Sensors as a makers coffee-table book: browse it to get ideas of whats available, and look for inspiration for new projects.

If you want to understand how sensors are connected to Arduino and Raspberry Pi, youll enjoy the in-depth explanations. All the sensor code examples are fully self-contained, completely showing the interaction with the sensor. Understanding the sensors in the book helps you apply your skills to new sensors, even ones that arent on the market yet.

When we chose the sensors for you, we picked a variety of useful and interesting sensors. We didnt just pick easy or difficult ones. This means youll get to see solutions to the wide variety of challenges involved in connecting sensors to Arduino and Raspberry Pi.

In each chapter youll find experiments, environmental experiments, and a test project:

Any robot or gadget you build must handle three things: input , processing , and output .

A protocol defines how a sensor talks to the microcontroller board, such as Arduino or Raspberry Pi. The protocol defines how the wires should be connected and how your code should ask for measurements.

Even though there are a staggering amount of different sensors, there are a limited number of popular protocols. Youll learn each of the protocols as you work through experiments and projects, but heres an overview of what youll be seeing.

You can get an overview of common sensor protocols in