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Email #2
The Fabulous World of Arduino

Hello Hello!
 

This is your second preparation email, it will introduce you with the FABULOUS world of Arduino! :)


Some information and Terminology:

  • Arduino is an open source computer hardware and software company, and the name “Arduino / Genuino” is a TM. but, since the code and the Hardware are open-source, there are other companies that provide Arduino-compatible boards, as well as complementing modules and electronic devices to be used with the Arduino. Two of them are SparkFun and  Adafruit.

  • Arduino is mostly based on AVR microcontrollers.

  • We already learned about GPIOs and PWM. sometime in order to connect with another module (usually another MCU, and not just electronic device that uses control lines), we need to transfer more information. This can be done by using a few GPOIs in a predefined way, such as in UART / SPI / I2C (Wire). It can be said that these are simple communication protocols (that does not require a complex specification or standardization such as in other communication protocols as Ethernet or Wi-Fi). Since we don’t have the time to go over all of them, we will focus on UART, since we will be using it in our workshop.

  • When writing code to Arduino and compiling, the output we get is a *.hex file. The content of the file is what will be burned to the flash. Please see the explanation on The Hex file format here or here . Since in most of embedded devices, this code can not be replaced after it is burned, it is called Firmware (something between Software and Hardware).

  • In order for you to get as ready as you can for our workshop, I wrote an Introduction to Arduino for you. It can be found HERE.

 

Installations:

An explanation about Arduino IDE Installation and importing Bluefruit-LE Board settings can be found in this link (Please ignore the “Troubleshooting” part for now).

Women of the Day

  • Get to know Limor Fried, that is also known as ladyada, a nickname that is an homage to Lady Ada Lovelace. This awesome women founded Adafruit, and we will be using Adafruits board in our workshop :)​​

link intro to
  • In our local arena Liat Segal, is an Artist that uses MCUs all the time in her artworks, that are presented in the past years all over the world. You can find great videos with her work on her website, here is a colourful one:

Get to work :)
Dafna.

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