arduinoprojects.com

In the last few days I've learnt a lot of new things. One of the most important - how to handle high-current electric circuits. The power that comes out of Arduino pins is enough to power some leds or write some text on a LCD display, but it's not enough to power a DC motor or other devices. Arduino pins output up to 40mA of voltage, while the DC motors I have require around 350mA. While finding out the ways of passing more current to my DC motors I found a great site explaining these basic things in a very understandable manner:

One of the things I was lacking all the time in my Arduino mini-projects was resistors - most of the projects we see on the internet require you to use some of them. As an absolute beginner in electronics I chose to buy a 480 resistor set which contains resistors with 16 different values, each of them in 30 pieces:

Besides that I also ordered a couple of photodiodes to use for my upcoming line-follower robot. Line follower robot was one of my first aims when I purchased the Arduino. So I'm quite close to getting started with it.

At first I thought that connecting and controlling a LCD display with Arduino is something complex and can be done only by people with good electronics background. I was wrong. It took me half an hour to figure out the steps to do to connect a newly bought LCD display. The only thing to note - the LCD display should be Hitachi HD44780 compatible. I bought my two LCD displays on eBay: LCD Display HD44780. Why did I buy two of them?

This morning a door bell woke up both of my kids after just a few minutes of sleep. I was quite angry at first, but my mood improved as I saw a postman holding a thick letter in his hands with my name on it. The LCD displays I ordered last thursday are already delivered. I must say I'm impressed by the shipping time.

I guess I'm going to restart the Arduino projects I had in my mind - a couple of steps have been done already.

The first and the most important - I have rebuilt this website to allow everybody participate in the content creation of this site.
The second - I have ordered new parts for my Arduino projects - two LCD displays. So you can expect to see my experience with some LCD test projects on this website soon.

One of the most important things in programming is writing understandable and readable code. Despite the fact that usually when you deal with electronics you have to write the code in very low level language, Arduino syntax is very close to such high level programming languages as C and PHP. If you know any of these languages, I bet there will be no problems for you.

The basic way of structuring your Arduino code is writing a normal procedural code. If we recall the example arduino code from the previous post, it was something like this:

As stated before, I have rather good experience in PHP programming. I’ve done many different things using PHP, starting from simple web applications to huge social network applications with tens of thousands simultaneous online users. I’ve also done some PHP applications that are used as servers for other software and even some basic desktop applications. With all that in mind, today I wanted to play around with Arduino and PHP. This might sound sick, but if you’ve read the previous posts, then you already know that PHP is my language of choice.

Ok, let’s get started with Arduino. You’ve decided that you want to learn some electronics and don’t have any clue on where to start. I was exactly in the same situation a while ago. I had bought the “electronics for dummies” book, red some paragraphs of it about resistors and some other components, but I had no idea on how to connect them and make them do things I need. The arduino is exactly what a beginner needs - it has very simple programming language, it can be connected directly to your computer via USB cable.