This past Saturday, the Michigan Flex Users Group put on an Arduino class at the TechSmith offices. If you don’t know what the Arduino is, the website says “Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.” Basically, it lets you make all kinds of cool hardware hacks.
The class was for people with no electronics experience. Besides hooking up batteries to lightbulbs in elementary school, I had none. I’ve always wanted to get into Arduino hacking, but I never knew where to start. This gave me the perfect opportunity.
So the first half of the day, we spent learning how to put together circuits on a breadboard. It was simple stuff like buttons and switches turning on LEDs but it was cool to me.
The later half of the day we started to actually program the Arduino. It uses a C like language and was actually quite simple to do. You use the provided Arduino software, write your code, and it’ll flash it to the microcontroller and start running it. I was getting blinking lights, fading lights, and messages on my computer in no time. It was a blast and I can’t wait to see what else I can do with it.
Here’s a video showing one of the hacks I made.
Now you just got to hook up the Arduino to your computer so it blinks when the lunch email comes around