I got an Arduino!
For Christmas, Gloria gave me an Arduino Starter Kit! It’s got an Arduino Uni, a bunch of wires, some resistors and LEDs and stuff, a motor, and I don’t know what else yet. I hadn’t been very intereted in Arduino until Rob Blackwell was giving a pretty neat demo at the “Quack and Hack” at DuckDuckGo last year. Still, I knew it would just be another thing to eat up my time, and I decided to stay away. Finally, though, I started having ideas of things that might be fun, but not too ambitious. I put the starter kit on my Christmas wish list and I got the Arduino Workshop book for cheap from O’Reilly.
The starter kit comes with its own book, but there are quite a few passages that appear verbatim in both books. I’m not sure of their relationship, but they’re different enough that I’ve been reading both. I’ve gotten a decent idea of how to accomplish simple things, but I don’t really understand the underlying ideas, yet. As I sat, squinting at a schematic, I wondered: Is this what beginning programmers feel like? “If I write these magic words, I know what will happen, but not why!” I already had a lot of sympathy for that kind of thinking, but it has been strengthened by this experience.
For example, I know that I can put a resistor on either side of a device in my circuit and it works, and I generally understand why, but then I don’t understand how a rectifying diode helps prevent problems with a spike caused by a closing relay? I need to find a good elementary course on electricity and electronics and I need to really let it sink in. This is one of those topics, like special relativity, that I’ve often understood for a few minutes, but not longer. (Special relativity finally sunk in once I wrote some programs to compute time dilation.)
I’m going to keep working through the books, because there’s clearly a lot more to learn. I’m not sure, though, what I’m hoping to do after I get through the whole thing. Even if I don’t keep using it after I finish the work, though, I think it will have been a good experience and worth having done.
My favorite project so far was one of my own. The Arduino Workshop has a project where you build a KITT-like scanner with five LEDs using pulse width modulation to make them scan left to right. That looked like it would be neat, but I skipped the software for left to right scanning and instead wrote a little program to make it count to 2⁶-1 over and over on its LED fingers.
Here’s the program:
void setup() {
for (int pin = 2; pin < 7; pin++) pinMode(pin, OUTPUT);
}
void loop() {
for (int a = 0; a < 64; a++) {
for (int pin = 2; pin < 7; pin++) {
digitalWrite(pin, (a & ( 2 << pin-2 )) ? HIGH : LOW);
}
delay(250);
}
}
I originally got stuck on the 2<<pin-2 expression because I wanted to use
exponentiation, which introduces some minor type complications. I was about to
sort them out when I remembered that I could just use bit shifting. That was a
nice (if tiny) relief.
Here’s what the decide looks like in action:
Working with hardware is different from software in ways that are easy to imagine, but that don’t really bug you until you’re experiencing them. If I have a good idea about how to rebuild a circuit to make it simpler, I can’t take a snapshot of the current state for a quick restore in case I was wrong. Or, I can, but it’s an actual snapshot on my camera, and I’ll have to rebuild by hand later.
If I make a particularly bad mistake, I can destroy a piece of hardware permanently. Given the very small amounts of power I’m using, this probably means “I can burn out an LED,” but it’s still a real problem. I’ve been surprised that there’s no “reset your device memory between projects” advice. I keep imagining that my old program will somehow cause harm to my new project’s circuits. Also, plugging the whole thing into my laptop makes me nervous every time. It’s a little silly, but it does.
My next project involves a servo motor. That should be fun.