Arduino is an electronics platform which is meant for artists, students and hobbyists. It is extremely easy to use. Arduino was created at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy by Massimo Banzi and Casey Reas. It’s hardware and software is open source. This is the first time I’m hearing about open source hardware. It means that the layout and schematics of the hardware is available to the user. This means that anyone can make their own arduino board after refering the original schematics. I attended a workshop on arduino at Ettimadai Campus of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, thats how I know about it. Arduino is programmed using simple C language. Its IDE came bundled with a lot of examples to make anyone feel homely. Arduino UNO uses the ATmega328P microcontroller.
The workshop was conducted by Ajith Peter sir. He is an electronics enthusiast. He has a lot of sensors and shields. He let us play with all the cool stuff we had. He is really friendly. He is presently doing his PhD in IIT-B. The workshop was conducted by Dept of Computational Engineering and Networking. CEN’s HOD, Soman sir also presided over the workshop. He is an expert in maths. A talk with him helped me to visualize the first and second semester maths geometrically. I had no idea what they meant. He helped me relate it to the simple high school maths.
We did a lot of stuff with Arduino. The first program we did was to make the LED on the board blink. Ajith sir explained the importance of this simple piece of code. It is the equivalent of the “Hello World!” program which every programmer begins with. Arduino doesn’t come bundled with any in-built output devices, so debugging is a problem. This is where the simple blink comes to the rescue. You can insert the blink code between modules of your program to check their functionality. We played with a lot of sensors. We used the Passive Infra Red(PIR) sensor to build a motion detector. Ultrasonic range finder to findto any obstruction in front of the device. Then we used GPS module to get gps data and used the serial monitor to display the data. We even connected a LCD display to the arduino and learnt how to use it. We learnt about serial communication, UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter), I2C protocol. Ajith sir also showed us how to build a circuit board using toner transfer and told us about the importance of spacing and thickness of lines on a circuit board. He introduced us to softwares like Eagle CADsoft and fritzing which maybe used to build schematics of various circuits and then create the circuit board using toner transfer.
The workshop was fun-filled and at the same time very informative. We’re planning to conduct a similar workshop in Amritapuri campus.
Vishnu Ramesh's life log 