Arduino for Beginners: Essential Skills Every Maker Needs

by John Baichtal

ARDUINO for BEGINNERS ESSENTIAL SKILLS EVERY MAKER NEEDS Loaded with full-color step-by-step illustrations! Absolutely no experience needed! Learn Arduino from the ground up, hands-on, in full color! Discover Arduino, join the DIY movement, and build an amazing spectrum of projects… limited only by your imagination! No “geekitude” This full-color guide assumes you know nothing about Arduino or programming with the Arduino IDE. John Baichtal is an expert on getting newcomers up to speed with DIY hardware. First, he guides you gently up the learning curve, teaching you all you need to know about Arduino boards, basic electronics, safety, tools, soldering, and a whole lot more. Then, you walk step-by-step through projects that reveal Arduino’s incredible potential for sensing and controlling the environment–projects that inspire you to create, invent, and build the future! · Use breadboards to quickly create circuits without soldering · Create a laser/infrared trip beam to protect your home from intruders · Use Bluetooth wireless connections and XBee to build doorbells and more · Write useful, reliable Arduino programs from scratch · Use Arduino’s ultrasonic, temperature, flex, and light sensors · Build projects that react to a changing environment · Create your own plant-watering robot · Control DC motors, servos, and stepper motors · Create projects that keep track of time · Safely control high-voltage circuits · Harvest useful parts from junk electronics · Build pro-quality enclosures that fit comfortably in your home

Genres: Technology

376 pages, Paperback

First published October 20, 2013

About the author

John Baichtal has written or edited over a dozen books, including the award-winning Cult of Lego (2011 No Starch Press), LEGO hacker bible Make: LEGO and Arduino Projects (2012 Maker Media) with Adam Wolf and Matthew Beckler, Robot Builder (Que 2014) and Basic Robot Building with LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 (Que 2012), as well as Maker Pro (Maker Media 2014), a collection of essays and interviews describing life as a professional maker. John lives in Minneapolis with his wife and three children.

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fun read.

I have been hobby-developing some Arduino projects in the evenings and weekends lately, and this was an excellent help.

Would recommend!

4.3/5

[Amjad Abdullah]

Good book for general ideas and gadgets you may need working with electronics in general and Arduino in specific. However, It doesn't teach you how to really code and how to think in coding. It provides examples most of which are related to how to deal with wood and plastic rather than dealing with the electronics and coding. I think this book is useful for people that has no idea about electronics and want to build Arduino applications without learning how to code. But for people that has electronics and coding abilities, the use of this book for them is very minimal.
There was something useful indeed with this book. But again, that's not what I read this book for.