Sinopsis
Phenomenon is an overused and overloaded term, but somehow it seems appropriate for Arduino—an endeavor that has caught the attention of an astonishingly wide range of people and provided opportunities for those who might otherwise have never picked up a soldering iron or written a single line of code. From dyed-in-the-wool hardware hackers to web page developers, robotics enthusiasts to installation artists, textile students to musicians: all can be found in the Arduino community. The versatility of the platform encompassing both hardware and software, combined with its inherent openness, has captured the imagination of tens of thousands of developers.
One of Arduino's many strengths is the sheer volume of information available in both printed form and on the web. Getting started is really pretty easy, as the core Arduino team intended. There are plenty of excellent introductory works already available both online and in print, so we didn't want to waste your time by providing yet another "blinking LED" tutorial. We figure that if you've gotten as far as picking up a 400+ page book about Arduino it's a good sign that you're ready for something a bit more substantial and wanting to learn more about the why rather than just the how.
We don't want you to be just a color-by-numbers painter, only able to assemble other peoples’ designs by dutifully plugging in wires according to a position overlay without really understanding the meaning behind it. We want you to become a true artist, able to conceptualize, design, and assemble your own creations.
We would be terribly disappointed if all our readers just reproduced our projects exactly as presented in the book, never deviating from the script. We want you to take these projects as inspiration and examples of how to apply a variety of handy techniques and then adapt them to suit your own requirements, coming up with new ideas that put ours to shame. We also hope that you'll share your creations with us and with the world, inspiring others in turn.
So we haven't included assembly overlays, and we don't expect you to slavishly follow a series of steps to exactly reproduce what we've prototyped. Instead we've included circuit diagrams, parts lists, photos, and in-depth explanations. That may seem a little scary and the idea of learning how to read a schematic may feel overwhelming, but a little effort invested to learn this fundamental skill will pay off many times over as you progress to designing and debugging your own projects.
Thus we have consciously left material out of Practical Arduino. We do not, for example, cover how to set up basic software tools such as the Arduino IDE. This is for two reasons—firstly because it is described very well on the http://arduino.cc web site itself, and secondly because anything that we provide in written form here will be out of date in a few short months! Instead we focused on providing the sort of information and background explanation that you will continue to draw on for years to come.
We hope that by following through the projects in this book, assembling some for yourself and reading through the others, you will gain a number of insights into the flexibility of Arduino as a platform for taking software and hardware and linking them to the physical world around us.
