Getting Started with Arduino (Make: Projects)
by Massimo Banzi
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Book Summary Information
Author: Massimo BanziEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-10-15
ISBN: 0596155514
Number of pages: 128
Publisher: Make
Book Reviews of Getting Started with Arduino (Make: Projects)
Book Review: Fun for tinkerers
Summary: 5 Stars
I love Make magazine. It captures the excitement and joy of tinkering, experimenting, and modifying things for fun. This is an experience I have had over and over through the years, beginning in my early childhood. I was that one kid that always took all of his toys apart, usually putting them back together with "improvements."
I have learned so much from doing things this way, probably more than I have learned from books. I am a book lover, but more than that, I am a tinkerer. I'm never content with knowing theory, I have to get my hands dirty and experiment, often before I bother to learn the theory.
It is this very personality trait that caused me to enjoy a book I read this week, Getting Started with Arduino. The book is published by O'Reilly as part of their Make: Projects series. There is also an accompanying website dedicated to the project.
The book begins with a description of Arduino. This is an open source electronics prototyping platform designed for experimentation and learning. It was originally begun as a way to teach designers how to build prototypes of the projects they are designing, along with simple embedded software development. It turns out that is is a really fun-sounding hobbyist platform, too. I'll get to the "fun-sounding" bit shortly.
The book is written in a way that an interested, but completely inexperienced person should be able to pick it up and read it, comprehend it, and begin to use the platform. I think that is possible. The text gives a clear and easy introduction to electronics without bogging down the casual newcomer in the details. In the long term, you would certainly want to study in greater depth from other resources, but for a person just looking to get started actually doing something, this book is ideal. It describes the Arduino hardware, gives an introduction to programming that is easy to follow and should allow any reader to play along with comprehension.
This is where I was unsatisfied: the software IDE and hardware drivers are easy to install and run on Windows and MacOSX, but not on Linux. There is a link in the book to a page that gives details of how to install on Linux, but it is more complicated and may turn some potential users off of the idea. I know that it's ironic for a tinkerer to not want to tinker, but remember, the target audience is people who love to get their hands dirty without knowing or having to figure out the details in advance. There are links on that page to instructions for installation in various Linux distributions, but all that I checked were at least one release out of date. As I write this, I'm running the 64 bit version of Ubuntu 8.10, but the most recent Ubuntu instructions were for 8.04. Could I figure it out? Of course, but these missing details are disappointing.
My final evaluation is that the project looks like a lot of fun, and the book really is an enjoyable read. I can think of several uses for the hardware without even trying and it would probably be a blast to play around with. I will watch the project and hope to see the usability and interactability with Linux made/kept more up to date. When that happens, I'm in. In the meanwhile, you will probably find me at the electronics surplus/reclamation shop or the swap meet and garage sales for looking for my potential victims, I mean, experimentation platforms.
Finally, I realize that most people use Windows, and a growing percentage, especially among geeks, are using Macs. I'm not an operating system zealot and don't wish to disparage those platforms or the author's choice to support them primarily. I just have a different preference and prefer to put my time and effort into things that work well/easily with my preferred OS.
Summary of Getting Started with Arduino (Make: Projects)
This valuable little book offers a thorough introduction to the open-source electronics prototyping platform that's taking the design and hobbyist world by storm. Getting Started with Arduino gives you lots of ideas for Arduino projects and helps you get going on them right away. From getting organized to putting the final touches on your prototype, all the information you need is right in the book.Inside, you'll learn about:
- Interaction design and physical computing
- The Arduino hardware and software development environment
- Basics of electricity and electronics
- Prototyping on a solderless breadboard
- Drawing a schematic diagram
Join the tens of thousands of hobbyists who have discovered this incredible (and educational) platform. Written by the co-founder of the Arduino project, with illustrations by Elisa Canducci, Getting Started with Arduino gets you in on the fun! This 128-page book is a greatly expanded follow-up to the author's original short PDF that's available on the Arduino website.
Getting Started with Arduino, authored by Arduino co-founder Massimo Banzi, offers a brief, fun, and lucid overview of Arduino that will appeal to lots of people who've been wanting to get into physical computing and want a way in. This handy little guide should be just the ticket. To work with the introductory examples in this book, all you need is a USB Arduino, USB A-B cable, and an LED.
The Arduino PlatformArduino is composed of two major parts: the Arduino board, which is the piece of hardware you work on when you build your objects; and the Arduino IDE, the piece of software you run on your computer. You use the IDE to create a sketch (a little computer program) that you upload to the Arduino board. The sketch tells the board what to do.
Not too long ago, working on hardware meant building circuits from scratch, using hundreds of different components with strange names like resistor, capacitor, inductor, transistor, and so on.
Every circuit was ?wired? to do one specific application, and making changes required you to cut wires, solder connections, and more.
With the appearance of digital technologies and microprocessors, these functions, which were once implemented with wires, were replaced by software programs.
Software is easier to modify than hardware. With a few keypresses, you can radically change the logic of a device and try two or three versions in the same amount of time that it would take you to solder a couple of resistors.
The Arduino Hardware
The Arduino board is a small microcontroller board, which is a small circuit (the board) that contains a whole computer on a small chip (the microcontroller). This computer is at least a thousand times less powerful than the MacBook I?m using to write this, but it?s a lot cheaper and very useful to build interesting devices. Look at the Arduino board: you?ll see a black chip with 28 ?legs??that chip is the ATmega168, the heart of your board.
We (the Arduino team) have placed on this board all the components that are required for this microcontroller to work properly and to communicate with your computer. There are many versions of this board; the one we?ll use throughout this book is the Arduino Duemilanove, which is the simplest one to use and the best one for learning on. However, these instructions apply to earlier versions of the board, including the more recent Arduino Diecimila and the older Arduino NG. The figure on the left below shows the Arduino Duemilanove; The figure on the right shows the Arduino NG.
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