www.it-ebooks.

info
www.it-ebooks.info
Getting
Started
with
Arduino
Massimo Banzi

Second Edition

www.it-ebooks.info
Getting Started with Arduino
by Massimo Banzi

Copyright © 2011 Massimo Banzi. All rights reserved.

Printed in the U.S.A.

Published by Make:Books, an imprint of Maker Media,

a division of O’Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472

O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business,

or sales promotional use. For more information, contact our
corporate/institutional sales department: 800-998-9938
or [email protected].

Print History:
October 2008: First Edition
September 2011: Second Edition

Executive Editor: Brian Jepson

Designer: Brian Scott
Indexer: Ellen Troutman Zaig
Illustrations: Elisa Canducci with Shawn Wallace

The O’Reilly logo is a registered trademark of O’Reilly Media, Inc.

The Make: Projects series designations and related trade dress
are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. The trademarks of third
parties used in this work are the property of their respective
owners.

Important Message to Our Readers: Your safety is your own

responsibility, including proper use of equipment and safety gear,
and determining whether you have adequate skill and experi-
ence. Electricity and other resources used for these projects are
dangerous unless used properly and with adequate precautions,
including safety gear. Some illustrations do not depict safety
precautions or equipment, in order to show the project steps
more clearly. These projects are not intended for use by children.

Use of the instructions and suggestions in Getting Started with

Arduino is at your own risk. O’Reilly Media, Inc., and the author
disclaim all responsibility for any resulting damage, injury, or
expense. It is your responsibility to make sure that your activities
comply with applicable laws, including copyright.

ISBN: 978-1-449-309879
[LSI]

www.it-ebooks.info
Contents
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

1/Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Intended Audience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
What Is Physical Computing?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2/The Arduino Way . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Prototyping. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Tinkering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Patching. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Circuit Bending. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Keyboard Hacks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
We Love Junk!. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Hacking Toys. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Collaboration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

3/The Arduino Platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

The Arduino Hardware . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
The Software (IDE). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Installing Arduino on Your Computer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Installing Drivers: Macintosh. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Installing Drivers: Windows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Port Identification: Macintosh. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Port Identification: Windows. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

4/Really Getting Started with Arduino . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Anatomy of an Interactive Device. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Sensors and Actuators. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Blinking an LED. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Pass Me the Parmesan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Arduino Is Not for Quitters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Real Tinkerers Write Comments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
The Code, Step by Step . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
What We Will Be Building . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
What Is Electricity? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Using a Pushbutton to Control the LED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
How Does This Work?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
One Circuit, A Thousand Behaviours. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

5/Advanced Input and Output . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

Trying Out Other On/Off Sensors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Controlling Light with PWM. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

www.it-ebooks.info
 Use a Light Sensor Instead of the Pushbutton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Analogue Input. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Try Other Analogue Sensors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Serial Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Driving Bigger Loads (Motors, Lamps, and the Like). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
Complex Sensors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

6/Talking to the Cloud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1

Planning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Coding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
Assembling the Circuit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Here’s How to Assemble It. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

7/Troubleshooting. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Testing the Board. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
Testing Your Breadboarded Circuit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Isolating Problems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
Problems with the IDE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
How to Get Help Online. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

Appendices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Appendix A/The Breadboard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Appendix B/Reading Resistors and Capacitors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Appendix C/Arduino Quick Reference. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 5
Appendix D/Reading Schematic Diagrams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

www.it-ebooks.info
Preface

A few years ago I was given a very interesting

challenge: teach designers the bare minimum
in electronics so that they could build inter-
active prototypes of the objects they were
designing.

I started following a subconscious instinct to teach electronics the same

way I was taught in school. Later on I realised that it simply wasn’t working
as well as I would like, and started to remember sitting in a class, bored
like hell, listening to all that theory being thrown at me without any practical
application for it.

In reality, when I was in school I already knew electronics in a very empirical

way: very little theory, but a lot of hands-on experience.

I started thinking about the process by which I really learned electronics:

» I took apart any electronic device I could put my hands on.

» I slowly learned what all those components were.
» I began to tinker with them, changing some of the connections inside
of them and seeing what happened to the device: usually something
between an explosion and a puff of smoke.

» I started building some kits sold by electronics magazines.

» I combined devices I had hacked, and repurposed kits and other circuits
that I found in magazines to make them do new things.

As a little kid, I was always fascinated by discovering how things work;

therefore, I used to take them apart. This passion grew as I targeted any
unused object in the house and then took it apart into small bits. Even-
tually, people brought all sorts of devices for me to dissect. My biggest

Preface v

www.it-ebooks.info
projects at the time were a dishwasher and an early computer that came
from an insurance office, which had a huge printer, electronics cards,
magnetic card readers, and many other parts that proved very interesting
and challenging to completely take apart.

After quite a lot of this dissecting, I knew what electronic components

were and roughly what they did. On top of that, my house was full of old
electronics magazines that my father must have bought at the beginning
of the 1970s. I spent hours reading the articles and looking at the circuit
diagrams without understanding very much.

This process of reading the articles over and over, with the benefit of
knowledge acquired while taking apart circuits, created a slow virtuous
circle.

A great breakthrough came one Christmas, when my dad gave me a kit

that allowed teenagers to learn about electronics. Every component was
housed in a plastic cube that would magnetically snap together with other
cubes, establishing a connection; the electronic symbol was written on
top. Little did I know that the toy was also a landmark of German design,
because Dieter Rams designed it back in the 1960s.

With this new tool, I could quickly put together circuits and try them out to
see what happened. The prototyping cycle was getting shorter and shorter.

After that, I built radios, amplifiers, circuits that would produce horrible
noises and nice sounds, rain sensors, and tiny robots.

I’ve spent a long time looking for an English word that would sum up that
way of working without a specific plan, starting with one idea and ending
up with a completely unexpected result. Finally, “tinkering” came along.
I recognised how this word has been used in many other fields to describe
a way of operating and to portray people who set out on a path of explora-
tion. For example, the generation of French directors who gave birth to the
“Nouvelle Vague” were called the “tinkerers”. The best definition of tinkering
that I’ve ever found comes from an exhibition held at the Exploratorium
in San Francisco:  

Tinkering is what happens when you try something you don’t quite know
how to do, guided by whim, imagination, and curiosity. When you tinker,
there are no instructions—but there are also no failures, no right or wrong
ways of doing things. It’s about figuring out how things work and reworking
them.

vi Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Contraptions, machines, wildly mismatched objects working in harmony—
this is the stuff of tinkering.

Tinkering is, at its most basic, a process that marries play and inquiry. 

—www.exploratorium.edu/tinkering

From my early experiments I knew how much experience you would need
in order to be able to create a circuit that would do what you wanted start-
ing from the basic components.

Another breakthrough came in the summer of 1982, when I went to London

with my parents and spent many hours visiting the Science Museum.
They had just opened a new wing dedicated to computers, and by follow-
ing a series of guided experiments, I learned the basics of binary math
and programming.

There I realised that in many applications, engineers were no longer build-

ing circuits from basic components, but were instead implementing a lot
of the intelligence in their products using microprocessors. Software was
replacing many hours of electronic design, and would allow a shorter
tinkering cycle.

When I came back I started to save money, because I wanted to buy a

computer and learn how to program.

My first and most important project after that was using my brand-new
ZX81 computer to control a welding machine. I know it doesn’t sound like
a very exciting project, but there was a need for it and it was a great chal-
lenge for me, because I had just learned how to program. At this point, it
became clear that writing lines of code would take less time than modify-
ing complex circuits.

Twenty-odd years later, I’d like to think that this experience allows me to
teach people who don’t even remember taking any math class and to infuse
them with the same enthusiasm and ability to tinker that I had in my youth
and have kept ever since.

—Massimo

Preface vii

www.it-ebooks.info
Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to Luisa and Alexandra.

First of all I want to thank my partners in the Arduino Team:

David Cuartielles, David Mellis, Gianluca Martino, and Tom Igoe.
It is an amazing experience working with you guys.

Barbara Ghella, she doesn’t know, but, without her precious

advice, Arduino and this book might have never happened.

Bill Verplank for having taught me more than Physical Computing.

Gillian Crampton-Smith for giving me a chance and for all I have

learned from her.

Hernando Barragan for the work he has done on Wiring.

Brian Jepson for being a great editor and enthusiastic supporter

all along.

Nancy Kotary, Brian Scott, Terry Bronson, and Patti Schiendelman

for turning what I wrote into a finished book.

I want to thank a lot more people but Brian tells me I’m running
out of space, so I’ll just list a small number of people I have to
thank for many reasons:

Adam Somlai-Fisher, Ailadi Cortelletti, Alberto Pezzotti,

Alessandro Germinasi, Alessandro Masserdotti, Andrea Piccolo,
Anna Capellini, Casey Reas, Chris Anderson, Claudio Moderini,
Clementina Coppini, Concetta Capecchi, Csaba Waldhauser,
Dario Buzzini, Dario Molinari, Dario Parravicini, Donata Piccolo,
Edoardo Brambilla, Elisa Canducci, Fabio Violante, Fabio Zanola,
Fabrizio Pignoloni, Flavio Mauri, Francesca Mocellin, Francesco
Monico, Giorgio Olivero, Giovanna Gardi, Giovanni Battistini,
Heather Martin, Jennifer Bove, Laura Dellamotta, Lorenzo
Parravicini, Luca Rocco, Marco Baioni, Marco Eynard, Maria
Teresa Longoni, Massimiliano Bolondi, Matteo Rivolta, Matthias
Richter, Maurizio Pirola, Michael Thorpe, Natalia Jordan,
Ombretta Banzi, Oreste Banzi, Oscar Zoggia, Pietro Dore,
Prof Salvioni, Raffaella Ferrara, Renzo Giusti, Sandi Athanas,
Sara Carpentieri, Sigrid Wiederhecker, Stefano Mirti, Ubi De Feo,
Veronika Bucko.

viii Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
How to Contact Us

We have verified the information in this book to the best of our

ability, but you may find things that have changed (or even that
we made mistakes!). As a reader of this book, you can help
us to improve future editions by sending us your feedback.
Please let us know about any errors, inaccuracies, misleading
or confusing statements, and typos that you find anywhere
in this book.

Please also let us know what we can do to make this book more
useful to you. We take your comments seriously and will try
to incorporate reasonable suggestions into future editions.

You can write to us at:

Maker Media
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(800) 998-9938 (in the U.S. or Canada)
(707) 829-0515 (international/local)
(707) 829-0104 (fax)

Maker Media is a division of O’Reilly Media devoted entirely to

the growing community of resourceful people who believe that
if you can imagine it, you can make it. Consisting of Make
magazine, Craft magazine, Maker Faire, as well as the Hacks,
Make:Projects, and DIY Science book series, Maker Media
encourages the Do-It-Yourself mentality by providing creative
inspiration and instruction.

For more information about Maker Media, visit us online:

MAKE www.makezine.com
CRAFT: www.craftzine.com
Maker Faire: www.makerfaire.com
Hacks: www.hackszine.com

To comment on the book, send email to

[email protected].

The O’Reilly web site for Getting Started with Arduino lists
examples, errata, and plans for future editions. You can find
this page at www.makezine.com/getstartedarduino.

For more information about this book and others, see the
O’Reilly website: www.oreilly.com.

For more information about Arduino, including discussion

forums and further documentation, see www.arduino.cc.

Preface ix

www.it-ebooks.info
www.it-ebooks.info
1/Introduction

Arduino is an open source physical computing

platform based on a simple input/output
(I/O) board and a development environment
that implements the Processing language
(www.processing.org). Arduino can be used
to develop standalone interactive objects
or can be connected to software on your
computer (such as Flash, Processing, VVVV,
or Max/MSP). The boards can be assembled
by hand or purchased preassembled; the
open source IDE (Integrated Development
Environment) can be downloaded for free
from www.arduino.cc.
Arduino is different from other platforms on the market because of these
features:

» It is a multiplatform environment; it can run on Windows, Macintosh,

and Linux.

» It is based on the Processing programming IDE, an easy-to-use

development environment used by artists and designers.

» You program it via a USB cable, not a serial port. This feature is useful,
because many modern computers don’t have serial ports.

» It is open source hardware and software—if you wish, you can

download the circuit diagram, buy all the components, and make your
own, without paying anything to the makers of Arduino.

Introduction 1

www.it-ebooks.info
» The hardware is cheap. The USB board costs about €20 (currently,
about US$35) and replacing a burnt-out chip on the board is easy and
costs no more than €5 or US$4. So you can afford to make mistakes.

» There is an active community of users, so there are plenty of people

who can help you.

» The Arduino Project was developed in an educational environment and

is therefore great for newcomers to get things working quickly.

This book is designed to help beginners understand what benefits they

can get from learning how to use the Arduino platform and adopting its
philosophy.

Intended Audience
This book was written for the “original” Arduino users: designers and
artists. Therefore, it tries to explain things in a way that might drive some
engineers crazy. Actually, one of them called the introductory chapters
of my first draft “fluff”. That’s precisely the point. Let’s face it: most
engineers aren’t able to explain what they do to another engineer, let
alone a regular human being. Let’s now delve deep into the fluff.

NOTE: Arduino builds upon the thesis work Hernando Barragan did on
the Wiring platform while studying under Casey Reas and me at IDII
Ivrea.

After Arduino started to become popular, I realised how experimenters,

hobbyists, and hackers of all sorts were starting to use it to create beauti-
ful and crazy objects. I realised that you’re all artists and designers in
your own right, so this book is for you as well.

Arduino was born to teach Interaction Design, a design discipline that

puts prototyping at the centre of its methodology. There are many defini-
tions of Interaction Design, but the one that I prefer is:
 
Interaction Design is the design of any interactive experience.

In today’s world, Interaction Design is concerned with the creation

of meaningful experiences between us (humans) and objects. It is a
good way to explore the creation of beautiful—and maybe even contro-
versial—experiences between us and technology. Interaction Design
encourages design through an iterative process based on prototypes

2 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
of ever-increasing fidelity. This approach—also part of some types
of “conventional” design—can be extended to include prototyping with
technology; in particular, prototyping with electronics.

The specific field of Interaction Design involved with Arduino is Physical

Computing (or Physical Interaction Design).

What Is Physical Computing?

Physical Computing uses electronics to prototype new materials for
designers and artists.

It involves the design of interactive objects that can communicate with

humans using sensors and actuators controlled by a behaviour imple-
mented as software running inside a microcontroller (a small computer
on a single chip).

In the past, using electronics meant having to deal with engineers all the
time, and building circuits one small component at the time; these issues
kept creative people from playing around with the medium directly. Most
of the tools were meant for engineers and required extensive knowledge.
In recent years, microcontrollers have become cheaper and easier to use,
allowing the creation of better tools.

The progress that we have made with Arduino is to bring these tools one
step closer to the novice, allowing people to start building stuff after only
two or three days of a workshop.

With Arduino, a designer or artist can get to know the basics of electronics
and sensors very quickly and can start building prototypes with very little
investment.

Introduction 3

www.it-ebooks.info
www.it-ebooks.info
2/The Arduino Way

The Arduino philosophy is based on making

designs rather than talking about them. It is
a constant search for faster and more power-
ful ways to build better prototypes. We have
explored many prototyping techniques and
developed ways of thinking with our hands.

Classic engineering relies on a strict process for getting from A to B;

the Arduino Way delights in the possibility of getting lost on the way and
finding C instead.

This is the tinkering process that we are so fond of—playing with the
medium in an open-ended way and finding the unexpected. In this search
for ways to build better prototypes, we also selected a number of soft-
ware packages that enable the process of constant manipulation of the
software and hardware medium.

The next few sections present some philosophies, events, and pioneers
that have inspired the Arduino Way.

The Arduino Way 5

www.it-ebooks.info
Prototyping
Prototyping is at the heart of the Arduino Way: we make things and build
objects that interact with other objects, people, and networks. We strive
to find a simpler and faster way to prototype in the cheapest possible way.

A lot of beginners approaching electronics for the first time think that they
have to learn how to build everything from scratch. This is a waste of
energy: what you want is to be able to confirm that something’s working
very quickly so that you can motivate yourself to take the next step or
maybe even motivate somebody else to give you a lot of cash to do it.

This is why we developed “opportunistic prototyping”: why spend time

and energy building from scratch, a process that requires time and in-
depth technical knowledge, when we can take ready-made devices and
hack them in order to exploit the hard work done by large companies
and good engineers?

Our hero is James Dyson, who made 5127 prototypes of his vacuum
cleaner before he was satisfied that he’d gotten it right (www.international.
dyson.com/jd/1947.asp).

6 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Tinkering
We believe that it is essential to play with technology, exploring different
possibilities directly on hardware and software—sometimes without a
very defined goal.

Reusing existing technology is one of the best ways of tinkering. Getting

cheap toys or old discarded equipment and hacking them to make them
do something new is one of the best ways to get to great results.

The Arduino Way 7

www.it-ebooks.info
Patching
I have always been fascinated by modularity and the ability to build complex
systems by connecting together simple devices. This process is very well
represented by Robert Moog and his analogue synthesizers. Musicians
constructed sounds, trying endless combinations by “patching together”
different modules with cables. This approach made the synthesizer look
like an old telephone switch, but combined with the numerous knobs, that
was the perfect platform for tinkering with sound and innovating music.
Moog described it as a process between “witnessing and discovering”.
I’m sure most musicians at first didn’t know what all those hundreds of
knobs did, but they tried and tried, refining their own style with no inter-
ruptions in the flow.

Reducing the number of interruptions to the flow is very important for

creativity—the more seamless the process, the more tinkering happens.

This technique has been translated into the world of software by “visual
programming” environments like Max, Pure Data, or VVVV. These tools
can be visualised as “boxes” for the different functionalities that they pro-
vide, letting the user build “patches” by connecting these boxes together.
These environments let the user experiment with programming without
the constant interruption typical of the usual cycle: “type program,
compile, damn—there is an error, fix error, compile, run”. If you are more
visually minded, I recommend that you try them out.

8 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
 The Arduino Way 9

www.it-ebooks.info
Circuit Bending

Circuit bending is one of the most interesting forms of tinkering. It’s the
creative short-circuiting of low-voltage, battery-powered electronic audio
devices such as guitar effect pedals, children’s toys, and small synthesiz-
ers to create new musical instruments and sound generators. The heart
of this process is the “art of chance”. It began in 1966 when Reed Ghazala,
by chance, shorted-out a toy amplifier against a metal object in his desk
drawer, resulting in a stream of unusual sounds. What I like about circuit
benders is their ability to create the wildest devices by tinkering away with
technology without necessarily understanding what they are doing on the
theoretical side.

10 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
It’s a bit like the Sniffin’ Glue fanzine shown here: during the punk era,
knowing three chords on a guitar was enough to start a band. Don’t let the
experts in one field tell you that you’ll never be one of them. Ignore them
and surprise them.

The Arduino Way 11

www.it-ebooks.info
Keyboard Hacks

12 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Computer keyboards are still the main way to interact with a computer
after more than 60 years. Alex Pentland, academic head of the MIT Media
Laboratory, once remarked: “Excuse the expression, but men’s urinals
are smarter than computers. Computers are isolated from what’s around
them.”1

As tinkerers, we can implement new ways to interact with software by

replacing the keys with devices that are able to sense the environment.
Taking apart a computer keyboard reveals a very simple (and cheap) de-
vice. The heart of it is a small board. It’s normally a smelly green or brown
circuit with two sets of contacts going to two plastic layers that hold the
connections between the different keys. If you remove the circuit and use
a wire to bridge two contacts, you’ll see a letter appear on the computer
screen. If you go out and buy a motion-sensing detector and connect
this to your keyboard, you’ll see a key being pressed every time some-
body walks in front of the computer. Map this to your favourite software,
and you have made your computer as smart as a urinal. Learning about
keyboard hacking is a key building block of prototyping and Physical
Computing.

1
Quoted in Sara Reese Hedberg, “MIT Media Lab’s quest for perceptive computers,” Intelligent Systems and
Their Applications, IEEE, Jul/Aug 1998.

The Arduino Way 13

www.it-ebooks.info
We Love Junk!
People throw away a lot of technology these days: old printers, comput-
ers, weird office machines, technical equipment, and even a lot of military
stuff. There has always been a big market for this surplus technology,
especially among young and/or poorer hackers and those who are just
starting out. This market become evident in Ivrea, where we developed
Arduino. The city used to be the headquarters of the Olivetti company.
They had been making computers since the 1960s; in the mid 1990s, they
threw everything away in junkyards in the area. These are full of com-
puter parts, electronic components, and weird devices of all kinds. We
spent countless hours there, buying all sorts of contraptions for very little
money and hacking into our prototypes. When you can buy a thousand
loudspeakers for very little money, you’re bound to come up with some
idea in the end. Accumulate junk and go through it before starting to build
something from scratch.

14 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Hacking Toys
Toys are a fantastic source of cheap technology to hack and reuse, as
evidenced by the practise of circuit bending mentioned earlier. With the
current influx of thousands of very cheap high-tech toys from China, you
can build quick ideas with a few noisy cats and a couple of light swords.
I have been doing this for a few years to get my students to understand
that technology is not scary or difficult to approach. One of my favourite
resources is the booklet “Low Tech Sensors and Actuators” by Usman
Haque and Adam Somlai-Fischer (lowtech.propositions.org.uk). I think
that they have perfectly described this technique in that handbook, and
I have been using it ever since.

The Arduino Way 15

www.it-ebooks.info
Collaboration
Collaboration between users is one of they key principles in the Arduino
world—through the forum at www.arduino.cc, people from different parts
of the world help each other learn about the platform. The Arduino team
encourages people to collaborate at a local level as well by helping them
set up users’ groups in every city they visit. We also set up a Wiki called
“Playground” (www.arduino.cc/playground) where users document their
findings. It’s so amazing to see how much knowledge these people pour
out on the Web for everybody to use. This culture of sharing and helping
each other is one of the things that I’m most proud of in regard to Arduino.

16 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
3/The Arduino Platform

Arduino is composed of two major parts: the

Arduino board, which is the piece of hardware
you work on when you build your objects; and
the Arduino IDE, the piece of software you run
on your computer. You use the IDE to create
a sketch (a little computer program) that you
upload to the Arduino board. The sketch tells
the board what to do.

Not too long ago, working on hardware meant building circuits from
scratch, using hundreds of different components with strange names like
resistor, capacitor, inductor, transistor, and so on.

Every circuit was “wired” to do one specific application, and making

changes required you to cut wires, solder connections, and more.

With the appearance of digital technologies and microprocessors, these

functions, which were once implemented with wires, were replaced by
software programs.

Software is easier to modify than hardware. With a few keypresses, you can
radically change the logic of a device and try two or three versions in the
same amount of time that it would take you to solder a couple of resistors.

The Arduino Hardware

The Arduino board is a small microcontroller board, which is a small circuit
(the board) that contains a whole computer on a small chip (the micro-
controller). This computer is at least a thousand times less powerful than
the MacBook I’m using to write this, but it’s a lot cheaper and very useful
to build interesting devices. Look at the Arduino board: you’ll see a black
chip with 28 “legs”—that chip is the ATmega328, the heart of your board.

The Arduino Platform 17

www.it-ebooks.info
We (the Arduino team) have placed on this board all the components that
are required for this microcontroller to work properly and to communicate
with your computer. There are many versions of this board; the one we’ll
use throughout this book is the Arduino Uno, which is the simplest one to
use and the best one for learning on. However, these instructions apply
to earlier versions of the board, including the Arduino Duemilanove from
2009. Figure 3-1 shows the Arduino Uno; Figure 3-2 shows the Arduino
Duemilanove.

In those illustrations, you see the Arduino board. At first, all those con-
nectors might be a little confusing. Here is an explanation of what every
element of the board does:

14 Digital IO pins (pins 0–13)

These can be inputs or outputs, which is specified by the sketch you
create in the IDE.

6 Analogue In pins (pins 0–5)

These dedicated analogue input pins take analogue values (i.e., voltage
readings from a sensor) and convert them into a number between 0 and
1023.

6 Analogue Out pins (pins 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, and 11)

These are actually six of the digital pins that can be reprogrammed for
analogue output using the sketch you create in the IDE.

The board can be powered from your computer’s USB port, most USB
chargers, or an AC adapter (9 volts recommended, 2.1mm barrel tip,
center positive). If there is no power supply plugged into the power
socket, the power will come from the USB board, but as soon as you plug
a power supply, the board will automatically use it.

NOTE: If you are using the older Arduino-NG or Arduino Diecimila,

you will need to set the power selection jumper (labelled PWR_SEL on
the board) to specify EXT (external) or USB power. This jumper can be
found between the plug for the AC adapter and the USB port.

18 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Figure 3-1. The Arduino Uno

Figure 3-2. The Arduino Duemilanove

The Arduino Platform 19

www.it-ebooks.info
The Software (IDE)
The IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a special program
running on your computer that allows you to write sketches for the
Arduino board in a simple language modeled after the Processing
(www.processing.org) language. The magic happens when you press
the button that uploads the sketch to the board: the code that you have
written is translated into the C language (which is generally quite hard for
a beginner to use), and is passed to the avr-gcc compiler, an important
piece of open source software that makes the final translation into the
language understood by the microcontroller. This last step is quite impor-
tant, because it’s where Arduino makes your life simple by hiding away as
much as possible of the complexities of programming microcontrollers.

The programming cycle on Arduino is basically as follows:

» Plug your board into a USB port on your computer.

» Write a sketch that will bring the board to life.
» Upload this sketch to the board through the USB connection and wait
a couple of seconds for the board to restart.

» The board executes the sketch that you wrote.

NOTE: Linux installation is complicated at the time of this writing. See

www.arduino.cc/playground/Learning/Linux for instructions.

Installing Arduino on Your Computer 

To program the Arduino board, you must first download the development
environment (the IDE) from here: www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software.
Choose the right version for your operating system.

Download the file and double-click on it to open it it; on Windows or Linux,

this creates a folder named arduino-[version], such as arduino-1.0. Drag
the folder to wherever you want it: your desktop, your Program Files
folder (on Windows), etc. On the Mac, double-clicking it will open a disk
image with an Arduino application (drag it to your Applications folder).
Now whenever you want to run the Arduino IDE, you’ll open up the arduino
(Windows and Linux) or Applications folder (Mac), and double-click the
Arduino icon. Don’t do this yet, though; there is one more step.

20 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
NOTE: If you have any trouble running the Arduino IDE, see Chapter 7,
Troubleshooting.
 
Now you must install the drivers that allow your computer to talk to your
board through the USB port.

Installing Drivers: Macintosh

The Arduino Uno on a Mac uses the drivers provided by the operating sys-
tem, so the procedure is quite simple. Plug the board into your computer.

The PWR light on the board should come on and the yellow LED labelled “L”
should start blinking.

You might see a popup window telling you that a new network interface
has been detected.

If that happens, Click “Network Preferences...”, and when it opens, click

“Apply”. The Uno will show up as “Not Configured”, but it’s working prop-
erly. Quit System Preferences.

If you have an older Arduino board, look for instructions here:

www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/MacOSX.

If the Arduino doesn’t work, see Chapter 7, Troubleshooting. 

Installing Drivers: Windows

Plug the Arduino board into the computer; when the Found New Hard-
ware Wizard window comes up, Windows will first try to find the driver on
the Windows Update site.

Windows XP will ask you whether to check Windows Update; if you don’t
want to use Windows Update, select the “No, not at this time” option and
click Next.

On the next screen, choose “Install from a list or specific location” and
click Next.

The Arduino Platform 21

www.it-ebooks.info
Navigate to and select the Uno’s driver file, named ArduinoUNO.inf,
located in the “Drivers” folder of the Arduino Software download (not
the “FTDI USB Drivers” sub-directory). Windows will finish up the driver
installation from there.

If you have an older board, look for instructions here:

www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/Windows.

Once the drivers are installed, you can launch the Arduino IDE and start
using Arduino.

Next, you must figure out which serial port is assigned to your Arduino
board—you’ll need that information to program it later. The instructions
for getting this information are in the following sections.

22 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Port Identification: Macintosh
From the Tools menu in the Arduino IDE, select “Serial Port” and select
the port that begins with /dev/cu.usbmodem; this is the name that your
computer uses to refer to the Arduino board. Figure 3-3 shows the list
of ports.

Figure 3-3.
The Arduino IDE’s list of serial ports

The Arduino Platform 23

www.it-ebooks.info
Port Identification: Windows
On Windows, the process is a bit more complicated—at least at the begin-
ning. Open the Device Manager by clicking the Start menu, right-clicking
on Computer (Vista) or My Computer (XP), and choosing Properties. On
Windows XP, click Hardware and choose Device Manager. On Vista, click
Device Manager (it appears in the list of tasks on the left of the window).

Look for the Arduino device in the list under “Ports (COM & LPT)”. The
Arduino will appear as “Arduino UNO” and will have a name like COM3,
as shown in Figure 3-4.

Figure 3-4.
The Windows Device Manager showing all available serial ports

24 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Note: On some Windows machines, the COM port has a number
greater than 9; this numbering creates some problems when Arduino is
trying to communicate with it. See Chapter 7, Troubleshooting, for help
on this problem.

Once you’ve figured out the COM port assignment, you can select that
port from the Tools > Serial Port menu in the Arduino IDE.

Now the Arduino development environment can talk to the Arduino board
and program it.

The Arduino Platform 25

www.it-ebooks.info
www.it-ebooks.info
4/Really Getting Started
with Arduino
Now you’ll learn how to build and program an
interactive device.
Anatomy of an Interactive Device
All of the objects we will build using Arduino follow a very simple pattern
that we call the “Interactive Device”. The Interactive Device is an electronic
circuit that is able to sense the environment using sensors (electronic
components that convert real-world measurements into electrical signals).
The device processes the information it gets from the sensors with
behaviour that’s implemented as software. The device will then be able to
interact with the world using actuators, electronic components that can
convert an electric signal into a physical action.

Sense/Perceive

Sensors

Behavior
(software)

Actuators

Act/React

Figure 4-1.
The interactive device

Really Getting Started with Arduino 27

www.it-ebooks.info
Sensors and Actuators
Sensors and actuators are electronic components that allow a piece of
electronics to interact with the world.

As the microcontroller is a very simple computer, it can process only

electric signals (a bit like the electric pulses that are sent between neurons
in our brains). For it to sense light, temperature, or other physical quantities,
it needs something that can convert them into electricity. In our body, for
example, the eye converts light into signals that get sent to the brain using
nerves. In electronics, we can use a simple device called a light-dependent
resistor (an LDR or photoresistor) that can measure the amount of light
that hits it and report it as a signal that can be understood by the micro-
controller.

Once the sensors have been read, the device has the information needed
to decide how to react. The decision-making process is handled by the
microcontroller, and the reaction is performed by actuators. In our bodies,
for example, muscles receive electric signals from the brain and convert
them into a movement. In the electronic world, these functions could be
performed by a light or an electric motor.

In the following sections, you will learn how to read sensors of different
types and control different kinds of actuators.

Blinking an LED
The LED blinking sketch is the first program that you should run to test
whether your Arduino board is working and is configured correctly. It is also
usually the very first programming exercise someone does when learn-
ing to program a microcontroller. A light-emitting diode (LED) is a small
electronic component that’s a bit like a light bulb, but is more efficient and
requires lower voltages to operate.

Your Arduino board comes with an LED preinstalled. It’s marked “L”. You
can also add your own LED—connect it as shown in Figure 4-2.

If you intend to keep the LED lit for a long period of time, you should
use a resistor as described on page 56.

K indicates the cathode (negative), or shorter lead; A indicates the anode

(positive), or longer lead.

28 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Figure 4-2.
Connecting an LED to Arduino

Really Getting Started with Arduino 29

www.it-ebooks.info
Once the LED is connected, you need to tell Arduino what to do. This is
done through code, that is, a list of instructions that we give the micro-
controller to make it do what we want.

On your computer, go open the folder where you copied the Arduino IDE.
Double-click the Arduino icon to start it. Select File > New and you’ll be
asked to choose a sketch folder name: this is where your Arduino sketch
will be stored. Name it Blinking_LED and click OK. Then, type the following
text (Example 01) into the Arduino sketch editor (the main window of
the Arduino IDE). You can also download it from www.makezine.com/
getstartedarduino. It should appear as shown in Figure 4-3.

// Example 01 : Blinking LED

const int LED = 13; // LED connected to

// digital pin 13

void setup()
{
pinMode(LED, OUTPUT); // sets the digital
// pin as output
}

void loop()
{
digitalWrite(LED, HIGH); // turns the LED on
delay(1000); // waits for a second
digitalWrite(LED, LOW); // turns the LED off
delay(1000); // waits for a second
}

30 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Verify
Upload to I/O board

Your sketch goes here

Figure 4-3.
The Arduino IDE with your first sketch loaded

Now that the code is in your IDE, you need to verify that it is correct. Press
the “Verify” button (Figure 4-3 shows its location); if everything is correct,
you’ll see the message “Done compiling” appear at the bottom of the
Arduino IDE. This message means that the Arduino IDE has translated
your sketch into an executable program that can be run by the board, a
bit like an .exe file in Windows or an .app file on a Mac.

At this point, you can upload it into the board: press the Upload to I/O
Board button (see Figure 4-3). This will reset the board, forcing it to stop
what it’s doing and listen for instructions coming from the USB port. The
Arduino IDE sends the current sketch to the board, which will store it in
its memory and eventually run it.

Really Getting Started with Arduino 31

www.it-ebooks.info
You will see a few messages appear in the black area at the bottom of the
window, and just above that area, you’ll see the message “Done upload-
ing” appear to let you know the process has completed correctly. There
are two LEDs, marked RX and TX, on the board; these flash every time
a byte is sent or received by the board. During the upload process, they
keep flickering.

If you don’t see the LEDs flicker, or if you get an error message instead of
“Done uploading”, then there is a communication problem between your
computer and Arduino. Make sure you’ve selected the right serial port (see
Chapter 3) in the Tools > Serial Port menu. Also, check the Tools > Board
menu to confirm that the correct model of Arduino is selected there.

If you are still having problems, check Chapter 7, Troubleshooting.

Once the code is in your Arduino board, it will stay there until you put
another sketch on it. The sketch will survive if the board is reset or turned
off, a bit like the data on your computer’s hard drive.

Assuming that the sketch has been uploaded correctly, you will see the
LED “L” turn on for a second and then turn off for a second. If you installed
a separate LED as shown back in Figure 4-2, that LED will blink, too.
What you have just written and run is a “computer program”, or sketch,
as Arduino programs are called. Arduino, as I’ve mentioned before, is a
small computer, and it can be programmed to do what you want. This is
done using a programming language to type a series of instructions in
the Arduino IDE, which turns it into an executable for your Arduino board.

I’ll next show you how to understand the sketch. First of all, the Arduino
executes the code from top to bottom, so the first line at the top is the
first one read; then it moves down, a bit like how the playhead of a video
player like QuickTime Player or Windows Media Player moves from left
to right showing where in the movie you are.

Pass Me the Parmesan

Notice the presence of curly brackets, which are used to group together
lines of code. These are particularly useful when you want to give a name
to a group of instructions. If you’re at dinner and you ask somebody,
“Please pass me the Parmesan cheese,” this kicks off a series of actions
that are summarised by the small phrase that you just said. As we’re
humans, it all comes naturally, but all the individual tiny actions required
to do this must be spelled out to the Arduino, because it’s not as powerful

32 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
as our brain. So to group together a number of instructions, you stick a {
before your code and an } after.

You can see that there are two blocks of code that are defined in this way
here. Before each one of them there is a strange command:
void setup()
This line gives a name to a block of code. If you were to write a list of
instructions that teach Arduino how to pass the Parmesan, you would
write void passTheParmesan() at the beginning of a block, and this block
would become an instruction that you can call from anywhere in the
Arduino code. These blocks are called functions. If after this, you write
passTheParmesan() anywhere in your code, Arduino will execute those
instructions and continue where it left off.

Arduino Is Not for Quitters

Arduino expects two functions to exist—one called setup() and one called
loop().

setup() is where you put all the code that you want to execute once at the
beginning of your program and loop() contains the core of your program,
which is executed over and over again. This is done because Arduino is
not like your regular computer—it cannot run multiple programs at the
same time and programs can’t quit. When you power up the board, the
code runs; when you want to stop, you just turn it off.

Real Tinkerers Write Comments

Any text beginning with // is ignored by Arduino. These lines are comments,
which are notes that you leave in the program for yourself, so that you can
remember what you did when you wrote it, or for somebody else, so that
they can understand your code.

It is very common (I know this because I do it all the time) to write a piece
of code, upload it onto the board, and say “Okay—I’m never going to have
to touch this sucker again!” only to realise six months later that you need
to update the code or fix a bug. At this point, you open up the program,
and if you haven’t included any comments in the original program, you’ll
think, “Wow—what a mess! Where do I start?” As we move along, you'll
see some tricks for how to make your programs more readable and easier
to maintain.

Really Getting Started with Arduino 33

www.it-ebooks.info
The Code, Step by Step
At first, you might consider this kind of explanation too unnecessary, a
bit like when I was in school and I had to study Dante’s Divina Commedia
(every Italian student has to go through that, as well as another book
called I promessi sposi, or The Betrothed—oh, the nightmares). For each
line of the poems, there were a hundred lines of commentary! However,
the explanation will be much more useful here as you move on to writing
your own programs.

// Example 01 : Blinking LED

A comment is a useful way for us to write little notes. The preceding title
comment just reminds us that this program, Example 01, blinks an LED.

const int LED = 13; // LED connected to

// digital pin 13
const int means that LED is an integer number that can’t be changed (i.e.
a constant) whose value is set to 13. It’s like an automatic search and re-
place for your code; in this case, it’s telling Arduino to write the number 13
every time the word LED appears. We are using this command to specify
that the LED we’re blinking is connected to the Arduino pin 13.

void setup()
This line tells Arduino that the next block of code will be called setup().

{
With this opening curly bracket, a block of code begins.

pinMode(LED, OUTPUT); // sets the digital

// pin as output
Finally, a really interesting instruction. pinMode tells Arduino how to con-
figure a certain pin. Digital pins can be used either as INPUT or OUTPUT.
In this case, we need an output pin to control our LED, so we place the
number of the pin and its mode inside the parentheses.
pinMode is a function, and the words (or numbers) specified inside the
parentheses are arguments. INPUT and OUTPUT are constants in the
Arduino language. (Like variables, constants are assigned values, except
that constant values are predefined and never change.)

}
This closing curly bracket signifies the end of the setup() function.

34 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
void loop()
{
loop() is where you specify the main behaviour of your interactive device.
It will be repeated over and over again until you switch the board off.

digitalWrite(LED, HIGH); // turns the LED on

As the comment says, digitalWrite() is able to turn on (or off) any pin that
has been configured as an OUTPUT. The first argument (in this case, LED)
specifies which pin should be turned on or off (remember that LED is a
constant value that refers to pin 13, so this is the pin that’s switched). The
second argument can turn the pin on (HIGH) or off (LOW).

Imagine that every output pin is a tiny power socket, like the ones you
have on the walls of your apartment. European ones are 230 V, American
ones are 110 V, and Arduino works at a more modest 5 V. The magic here
is when software becomes hardware. When you write digitalWrite(LED,
HIGH), it turns the output pin to 5 V, and if you connect an LED, it will light
up. So at this point in your code, an instruction in software makes some-
thing happen in the physical world by controlling the flow of electricity to
the pin. Turning on and off the pin at will now let us translate these into
something more visible for a human being; the LED is our actuator.

delay(1000); // waits for a second

Arduino has a very basic structure. Therefore, if you want things to happen
with a certain regularity, you tell it to sit quietly and do nothing until it is
time to go to the next step. delay() basically makes the processor sit
there and do nothing for the amount of milliseconds that you pass as
an argument. Milliseconds are thousandths of seconds; therefore, 1000
milliseconds equals 1 second. So the LED stays on for one second here.

digitalWrite(LED, LOW); // turns the LED off

This instruction now turns off the LED that we previously turned on. Why
do we use HIGH and LOW? Well, it’s an old convention in digital electronics.
HIGH means that the pin is on, and in the case of Arduino, it will be set at
5 V. LOW means 0 V. You can also replace these arguments mentally with
ON and OFF.

delay(1000); // waits for a second

Here, we delay for another second. The LED will be off for one second.

}
This closing curly bracket marks end of the loop function.

Really Getting Started with Arduino 35

www.it-ebooks.info
To sum up, this program does this:

» Turns pin 13 into an output (just once at the beginning)

» Enters a loop
» Switches on the LED connected to pin 13
» Waits for a second
» Switches off the LED connected to pin 13
» Waits for a second
» Goes back to beginning of the loop
I hope that wasn’t too painful. You’ll learn more about how to program as
you go through the later examples.

Before we move on to the next section, I want you to play with the code.
For example, reduce the amount of delay, using different numbers for
the on and off pulses so that you can see different blinking patterns. In
particular, you should see what happens when you make the delays very
small, but use different delays for on and off … there is a moment when
something strange happens; this “something” will be very useful when
you learn about pulse-width modulation later in this book.

What We Will Be Building

I have always been fascinated by light and the ability to control different
light sources through technology. I have been lucky enough to work on
some interesting projects that involve controlling light and making it
interact with people. Arduino is really good at this. Throughout this book,
we will be working on how to design “interactive lamps”, using Arduino
as a way to learn the basics of how interactive devices are built.

In the next section, I’ll try to explain the basics of electricity in a way that
would bore an engineer, but won’t scare a new Arduino programmer.

36 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
What Is Electricity?
If you have done any plumbing at home, electronics won’t be a problem
for you to understand. To understand how electricity and electric circuits
work, the best way is to use something called the “water analogy”. Let’s
take a simple device, like the battery-powered portable fan shown in
Figure 4-4.

Figure 4-4.
A portable fan

If you take a fan apart, you will see that it contains a small battery, a
couple of wires, and an electric motor, and that one of the wires going to
the motor is interrupted by a switch. If you have a fresh battery in it and
turn the switch on, the motor will start to spin, providing the necessary

Really Getting Started with Arduino 37

www.it-ebooks.info
chill. How does this work? Well, imagine that the battery is both a water
reservoir and a pump, the switch is a tap, and the motor is one of those
wheels that you see in watermills. When you open the tap, water flows
from the pump and pushes the wheel into motion.

In this simple hydraulic system, shown in Figure 4-5, two factors are
important: the pressure of the water (this is determined by the power of
pump) and the amount of water that will flow in the pipes (this depends on
the size of the pipes and the resistance that the wheel will provide to the
stream of water hitting it).

Figure 4-5.
A hydraulic system

You’ll quickly realise that if you want the wheel to spin faster, you need to
increase the size of the pipes (but this works only up to a point) and in-
crease the pressure that the pump can achieve. Increasing the size of the
pipes allows a greater flow of water to go through them; by making them
bigger, we have effectively reduced the pipes’ resistance to the flow of
water. This approach works up to a certain point, at which the wheel won’t
spin any faster, because the pressure of the water is not strong enough.
When we reach this point, we need the pump to be stronger. This method
of speeding up the watermill can go on until the point when the wheel falls
apart because the water flow is too strong for it and it is destroyed.
Another thing you will notice is that as the wheel spins, the axle will heat
up a little bit, because no matter how well we have mounted the wheel,

38 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
the friction between the axle and the holes in which it is mounted in will
generate heat. It is important to understand that in a system like this, not
all the energy you pump into the system will be converted into movement;
some will be lost in a number of inefficiencies and will generally show up
as heat emanating from some parts of the system.

So what are the important parts of the system? The pressure produced by
the pump is one; the resistance that the pipes and wheel offer to the flow
of water, and the actual flow of water (let’s say that this is represented
by the number of litres of water that flow in one second) are the others.
Electricity works a bit like water. You have a kind of pump (any source
of electricity, like a battery or a wall plug) that pushes electric charges
(imagine them as “drops” of electricity) down pipes, which are repre-
sented by the wires—some devices are able to use these to produce heat
(your grandma’s electric blanket), light (your bedroom lamp), sound
(your stereo), movement (your fan), and much more.

So when you read that a battery’s voltage is 9 V, think of this voltage like
the water pressure that can potentially be produced by this little “pump”.
Voltage is measured in volts, named after Alessandro Volta, the inventor
of the first battery.

Just as water pressure has an electric equivalent, the flow rate of water
does, too. This is called current, and is measured in amperes (after
André-Marie Ampère, electromagnetism pioneer). The relationship
between voltage and current can be illustrated by returning to the water
wheel: a higher voltage (pressure) lets you spin a wheel faster; a higher
flow rate (current) lets you spin a larger wheel.

Finally, the resistance opposing the flow of current over any path that it
travels is called—you guessed it—resistance, and is measured in ohms
(after the German physicist Georg Ohm). Herr Ohm was also responsible
for formulating the most important law in electricity—and the only formula
that you really need to remember. He was able to demonstrate that in a
circuit the voltage, the current, and the resistance are all related to each
other, and in particular that the resistance of a circuit determines the
amount of current that will flow through it, given a certain voltage supply.

It’s very intuitive, if you think about it. Take a 9 V battery and plug it into
a simple circuit. While measuring current, you will find that the more resis-
tors you add to the circuit, the less current will travel through it. Going back
to the analogy of water flowing in pipes, given a certain pump, if I install
a valve (which we can relate to a variable resistor in electricity), the more

Really Getting Started with Arduino 39

www.it-ebooks.info
I close the valve—increasing resistance to water flow—the less water will
flow through the pipes. Ohm summarised his law in these formulae:

R (resistance) = V (voltage) / I (current)

V = R * I
I = V / R

This is the only rule that you really have to memorise and learn to use,
because in most of your work, this is the only one that you will really need.

Using a Pushbutton to Control the LED

Blinking an LED was easy, but I don’t think you would stay sane if your
desk lamp were to continuously blink while you were trying to read a book.
Therefore, you need to learn how to control it. In our previous
example, the LED was our actuator, and our Arduino was controlling it.
What is missing to complete the picture is a sensor.

In this case, we’re going to use the simplest form of sensor available:
a pushbutton.

If you were to take apart a pushbutton, you would see that it is a very
simple device: two bits of metal kept apart by a spring, and a plastic cap
that when pressed brings the two bits of metal into contact. When the bits
of metal are apart, there is no circulation of current in the pushbutton (a bit
like when a water valve is closed); when we press it, we make a connection.

To monitor the state of a switch, there’s a new Arduino instruction that

you’re going to learn: the digitalRead() function.

digitalRead() checks to see whether there is any voltage applied to the

pin that you specify between parentheses, and returns a value of HIGH or
LOW, depending on its findings. The other instructions that we’ve used so
far haven’t returned any information—they just executed what we asked
them to do. But that kind of function is a bit limited, because it will force
us to stick with very predictable sequences of instructions, with no input
from the outside world. With digitalRead(), we can “ask a question” of
Arduino and receive an answer that can be stored in memory somewhere
and used to make decisions immediately or later.

Build the circuit shown in Figure 4-6. To build this, you’ll need to obtain some
parts (these will come in handy as you work on other projects as well):

40 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
» Solderless breadboard: Maker Shed (www.makershed.com) part num-
ber MKKN3, Arduino Store (bit.ly/ArduinoStoreBreadBoard). Appendix A
is an introduction to the solderless breadboard.

» Pre-cut jumper wire kit: Maker Shed MKKN4, Arduino Store (included
with the breadboard)

» One 10K Ohm resistor: Maker Shed JM691104 (100-pack), Arduino

Store (bit.ly/ArduinoStore10k, 10-pack)

» Momentary tactile pushbutton switch: Maker Shed JM119011, Arduino

Store (bit.ly/ArduinoStorePushButtons)

Figure 4-6.
Hooking up a pushbutton

Really Getting Started with Arduino 41

www.it-ebooks.info
NOTE: instead of buying precut jumper wire, you can also buy 22 AWG
solid-core hookup wire in small spools and cut and strip it using wire
cutters and wire strippers.

Let’s have a look at the code that we’ll be using to control the LED with our
pushbutton:

// Example 02: Turn on LED while the button is pressed

const int LED = 13; // the pin for the LED

const int BUTTON = 7; // the input pin where the
// pushbutton is connected
int val = 0; // val will be used to store the state
// of the input pin

void setup() {
pinMode(LED, OUTPUT); // tell Arduino LED is an output
pinMode(BUTTON, INPUT); // and BUTTON is an input
}

void loop(){
val = digitalRead(BUTTON); // read input value and store it

// check whether the input is HIGH (button pressed)

if (val == HIGH) {
digitalWrite(LED, HIGH); // turn LED ON
} else {
digitalWrite(LED, LOW);
}
}

In Arduino, select File > New (if you have another sketch open, you may
want to save it first). When Arduino asks you to name your new sketch
folder, type PushButtonControl. Type the Example 02 code into Arduino
(or download it from www.makezine.com/getstartedarduino and paste
it into the Arduino IDE). If everything is correct, the LED will light up when
you press the button.

How Does This Work?

I have introduced two new concepts with this example program: functions
that return the result of their work and the if statement.

42 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
The if statement is possibly the most important instruction in a program-
ming language, because it allows the computer (and remember, the
Arduino is a small computer) to make decisions. After the if keyword,
you have to write a “question” inside parentheses, and if the “answer”,
or result, is true, the first block of code will be executed; otherwise, the
block of code after else will be executed. Notice that I have used the ==
symbol instead of =. The former is used when two entities are compared,
and returns TRUE or FALSE; the latter assigns a value to a variable. Make
sure that you use the correct one, because it is very easy to make that
mistake and use just =, in which case your program will never work. I know,
because after 25 years of programming, I still make that mistake.

Holding your finger on the button for as long as you need light is not
practical. Although it would make you think about how much energy
you’re wasting when you walk away from a lamp that you left on, we need
to figure out how to make the on button “stick”.

One Circuit, A Thousand Behaviours

The great advantage of digital, programmable electronics over classic
electronics now becomes evident: I will show you how to implement many
different “behaviours” using the same electronic circuit as in the previous
section, just by changing the software.

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s not very practical to have to hold your finger
on the button to have the light on. We therefore must implement some
form of “memory”, in the form of a software mechanism that will remem-
ber when we have pressed the button and will keep the light on even after
we have released it.

To do this, we’re going to use what is called a variable. (We have used
one already, but I haven’t explained it.) A variable is a place in the Arduino
memory where you can store data. Think of it like one of those sticky
notes you use to remind yourself about something, such as a phone
number: you take one, you write “Luisa 02 555 1212” on it, and you stick
it to your computer monitor or your fridge. In the Arduino language,
it’s equally simple: you just decide what type of data you want to store
(a number or some text, for example), give it a name, and when you want
to, you can store the data or retrieve it. For example:
int val = 0;
int means that your variable will store an integer number, val is the name
of the variable, and = 0 assigns it an initial value of zero.

Really Getting Started with Arduino 43

www.it-ebooks.info
A variable, as the name intimates, can be modified anywhere in your
code, so that later on in your program, you could write:
val = 112;
which reassigns a new value, 112, to your variable.

Note: Have you noticed that in Arduino, every instruction ends with
a semicolon? This is done so that the compiler (the part of Arduino
that turns your sketch into a program that the microcontroller can
run) knows that your statement is finished and a new one is beginning.
Remember to use it all the time.

In the following program, val is used to store the result of digitalRead();

whatever Arduino gets from the input ends up in the variable and will stay
there until another line of code changes it. Notice that variables use a type
of memory called RAM. It is quite fast, but when you turn off your board,
all data stored in RAM is lost (which means that each variable is reset
to its initial value when the board is powered up again). Your programs
themselves are stored in flash memory—this is the same type used by
your mobile phone to store phone numbers—which retains its content
even when the board is off.

Let’s now use another variable to remember whether the LED has to stay
on or off after we release the button. Example 03A is a first attempt at
achieving that:

44 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
 // Example 03A: Turn on LED when the button is pressed
// and keep it on after it is released

const int LED = 13; // the pin for the LED

const int BUTTON = 7; // the input pin where the
// pushbutton is connected
int val = 0; // val will be used to store the state
// of the input pin
int state = 0; // 0 = LED off while 1 = LED on

void setup() {
pinMode(LED, OUTPUT); // tell Arduino LED is an output
pinMode(BUTTON, INPUT); // and BUTTON is an input
}

void loop() {
val = digitalRead(BUTTON); // read input value and store it

// check if the input is HIGH (button pressed)

// and change the state
if (val == HIGH) {
state = 1 - state;
}

if (state == 1) {
digitalWrite(LED, HIGH); // turn LED ON
} else {
digitalWrite(LED, LOW);
}
}

Now go test this code. You will notice that it works … somewhat. You’ll find
that the light changes so rapidly that you can’t reliably set it on or off with
a button press.

Let’s look at the interesting parts of the code: state is a variable that
stores either 0 or 1 to remember whether the LED is on or off. After the
button is released, we initialise it to 0 (LED off).

Really Getting Started with Arduino 45

www.it-ebooks.info
Later, we read the current state of the button, and if it’s pressed (val ==
HIGH), we change state from 0 to 1, or vice versa. We do this using a small
trick, as state can be only either 1 or 0. The trick I use involves a small
mathematical expression based on the idea that 1 – 0 is 1 and 1 – 1 is 0:
state = 1 – state;
The line may not make much sense in mathematics, but it does in pro-
gramming. The symbol = means “assign the result of what’s after me to
the variable name before me”—in this case, the new value of state is as-
signed the value of 1 minus the old value of state.

Later in the program, you can see that we use state to figure out whether
the LED has to be on or off. As I mentioned, this leads to somewhat flaky
results.

The results are flaky because of the way we read the button. Arduino is
really fast; it executes its own internal instructions at a rate of 16 million
per second—it could well be executing a few million lines of code per sec-
ond. So this means that while your finger is pressing the button, Arduino
might be reading the button’s position a few thousand times and chang-
ing state accordingly. So the results end up being unpredictable; it might
be off when you wanted it on, or vice versa. As even a broken clock is right
twice a day, the program might show the correct behaviour every once
in a while, but much of the time it will be wrong.

How do we fix this? Well, we need to detect the exact moment when the
button is pressed—that is the only moment that we have to change state.
The way I like to do it is to store the value of val before I read a new one;
this allows me to compare the current position of the button with the
previous one and change state only when the button becomes HIGH after
being LOW.

Example 03B contains the code to do so:

46 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
 // Example 03B: Turn on LED when the button is pressed
// and keep it on after it is released
// Now with a new and improved formula!

const int LED = 13; // the pin for the LED

const int BUTTON = 7; // the input pin where the
// pushbutton is connected
int val = 0; // val will be used to store the state
// of the input pin
int old_val = 0; // this variable stores the previous
// value of "val"
int state = 0; // 0 = LED off and 1 = LED on

void setup() {
pinMode(LED, OUTPUT); // tell Arduino LED is an output
pinMode(BUTTON, INPUT); // and BUTTON is an input
}
void loop(){
val = digitalRead(BUTTON); // read input value and store it
// yum, fresh

// check if there was a transition

if ((val == HIGH) && (old_val == LOW)){
state = 1 - state;
}

old_val = val; // val is now old, let's store it

if (state == 1) {
digitalWrite(LED, HIGH); // turn LED ON
} else {
digitalWrite(LED, LOW);
}
}

Test it: we’re almost there!

You may have noticed that this approach is not entirely perfect, due to
another issue with mechanical switches. Pushbuttons are very simple
devices: two bits of metal kept apart by a spring. When you press the

Really Getting Started with Arduino 47

www.it-ebooks.info
button, the two contacts come together and electricity can flow. This
sounds fine and simple, but in real life the connection is not that perfect,
especially when the button is not completely pressed, and it generates
some spurious signals called bouncing.

When the pushbutton is bouncing, the Arduino sees a very rapid sequence
of on and off signals. There are many techniques developed to do
de-bouncing, but in this simple piece of code I’ve noticed that it’s usually
enough to add a 10- to 50-millisecond delay when the code detects a
transition.

Example 03C is the final code:

48 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
// Example 03C: Turn on LED when the button is pressed
// and keep it on after it is released
// including simple de-bouncing
// Now with another new and improved formula!!

const int LED = 13; // the pin for the LED

const int BUTTON = 7; // the input pin where the
// pushbutton is connected
int val = 0; // val will be used to store the state
// of the input pin
int old_val = 0; // this variable stores the previous
// value of "val"
int state = 0; // 0 = LED off and 1 = LED on

void setup() {
pinMode(LED, OUTPUT); // tell Arduino LED is an output
pinMode(BUTTON, INPUT); // and BUTTON is an input
}

void loop(){
val = digitalRead(BUTTON); // read input value and store it
// yum, fresh

// check if there was a transition

if ((val == HIGH) && (old_val == LOW)){
state = 1 - state;
delay(10);
}

old_val = val; // val is now old, let's store it

if (state == 1) {
digitalWrite(LED, HIGH); // turn LED ON
} else {
digitalWrite(LED, LOW);
}
}

Really Getting Started with Arduino 49

www.it-ebooks.info
www.it-ebooks.info
5/Advanced Input
and Output
What you have just learned in Chapter 4 are
the most elementary operations we can do in
Arduino: controlling digital output and reading
digital input. If Arduino were some sort of
human language, those would be two letters
of its alphabet. Considering that there are just
five letters in this alphabet, you can see how
much more work we have to do before we can
write Arduino poetry.
Trying Out Other On/Off Sensors
Now that you’ve learned how to use a pushbutton, you should know that
there are many other very basic sensors that work according to the same
principle:

Switches
Just like a pushbutton, but doesn’t automatically change state when
released

Thermostats
A switch that opens when the temperature reaches a set value

Magnetic switches (also known as “reed relays”)

Has two contacts that come together when they are near a magnet; used
by burglar alarms to detect when a window is opened

Carpet switches
Small mats that you can place under a carpet or a doormat to detect the
presence of a human being (or heavy cat)

Advanced Input and Output 51

www.it-ebooks.info
Tilt switches
A simple electronic component that contains two contacts and a little
metal ball (or a drop of mercury, but I don’t recommend using those)
An example of a tilt switch is called a tilt sensor. Figure 5-1 shows the
inside of a typical model. When the sensor is in its upright position, the
ball bridges the two contacts, and this works just as if you had pressed a
pushbutton. When you tilt this sensor, the ball moves, and the contact is
opened, which is just as if you had released a pushbutton. Using this simple
component, you can implement, for example, gestural interfaces that react
when an object is moved or shaken (bit.ly/ArduinoStoreTiltSensor).

Figure 5-1.
The inside of a tilt sensor

52 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Another sensor that you might want to try is the infrared sensor as found
in burglar alarms (also known as a passive infrared or PIR sensor; see
Figure 5-2). This small device triggers when a human being (or other living
being) moves within its proximity. It’s a simple way to detect motion.

Figure 5–2.
Typical PIR sensor

Advanced Input and Output 53

www.it-ebooks.info
You should now experiment by looking at all the possible devices that
have two contacts that close, like the thermostat that sets a room’s tem-
perature (use an old one that’s no longer connected), or just placing two
contacts next to each other and dropping water onto them.

For example, by using the final example from Chapter 4 and a PIR sensor,
you could make your lamp respond to the presence of human beings, or
you could use a tilt switch to build one that turns off when it’s tilted on
one side.

Controlling Light with PWM

With the knowledge that you have so far gained, you could build an
interactive lamp that can be controlled—and not just with a boring on/off
switch, but maybe in a way that’s a bit more elegant. One of the limita-
tions of the blinking LED examples that we have used so far is that you
can turn the light only on and off. A fancy interactive lamp needs to be
dimmable. To solve this problem, we can use a little trick that makes a lot
of things such as TV or cinema possible: persistence of vision.

As I hinted after the first example in Chapter 4, if you change the num-
bers in the delay function until you don’t see the LED blinking any more,
you will notice that the LED seems to be dimmed at 50% of its normal
brightness. Now change the numbers so that the LED is on is one quarter
of the time that it’s off. Run the sketch and you’ll see that the brightness
is roughly 25%. This technique is called pulse width modulation (PWM),
a fancy way of saying that if you blink the LED fast enough, you don’t see
it blink any more, but you can change its brightness by changing the ratio
between the on time and the off time. Figure 5-3 shows how this works.

This technique also works with devices other than an LED. For example,
you can change the speed of a motor in the same way.

While experimenting, you will see that blinking the LED by putting delays
in your code is a bit inconvenient, because as soon as you want to read a
sensor or send data on the serial port, the LED will flicker while it’s waiting
for you to finish reading the sensor. Luckily, the processor used by the
Arduino board has a piece of hardware that can very efficiently blink three
LEDs while your sketch does something else. This hardware is imple-
mented in pins 9, 10, and 11, which can be controlled by the analogWrite()
instruction.

54 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Figure 5-3.
PWM in action

Advanced Input and Output 55

www.it-ebooks.info
For example, writing analogWrite(9,128) will set the brightness of an LED con-
nected to pin 9 to 50%. Why 128? analogWrite() expects a number between 0
and 255 as an argument, where 255 means full brightness and 0 means off.

Note: Having three channels is very good, because if you buy red,
green, and blue LEDs, you can mix their lights and make light of any
colour that you like!

Let’s try it out. Build the circuit that you see in Figure 5-4. Note that LEDs
are polarized: the long pin (positive) should go to the right, and the short
pin (negative) to the left. Also, most LEDs have a flattened negative side,
as shown in the figure. Use a 270 ohm resistor (red violet brown).

Figure 5-4.
LED connected to PWM pin

56 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Then, create a new sketch in Arduino and use Example 04 (you can also
download code examples from www.makezine.com/getstartedarduino):

// Example 04: Fade an LED in and out like on

// a sleeping Apple computer

const int LED = 9; // the pin for the LED

int i = 0; // We’ll use this to count up and down

void setup() {
pinMode(LED, OUTPUT); // tell Arduino LED is an output
}

void loop(){

for (i = 0; i < 255; i++) { // loop from 0 to 254 (fade in)

analogWrite(LED, i); // set the LED brightness
delay(10); // Wait 10ms because analogWrite
// is instantaneous and we would
// not see any change
}

for (i = 255; i > 0; i--) { // loop from 255 to 1 (fade out)

analogWrite(LED, i); // set the LED brightness

delay(10); // Wait 10ms
}

Now you have a replicated a fancy feature of a laptop computer (maybe

it’s a bit of a waste to use Arduino for something so simple). Let’s use this
knowledge to improve our lamp.

Add the circuit we used to read a button (back in Chapter 4) to this bread-
board. See if you can do this without looking at the next page, because I
want you to start thinking about the fact that each elementary circuit
I show here is a “building block” to make bigger and bigger projects. If
you need to peek ahead, don’t worry; the most important thing is that you
spend some time thinking about how it might look.

Advanced Input and Output 57

www.it-ebooks.info
To create this circuit, you will need to combine the circuit you just built
(shown in Figure 5-4) with the pushbutton circuit shown in Figure 4-6.
If you’d like, you can simply build both circuits on different parts of the
breadboard; you have plenty of room. However, one of the advantages
of the breadboard (see Appendix A) is that there is a pair of rails running
horizontally across the bottom and top. One is marked red (for positive)
and the other blue or black (for ground).

These rails are used to distribute power and ground to where it’s needed.
In the case of the circuit you need to build for this example, you have
two components (both of them resistors) that need to be connected to
the GND (ground) pin on the Arduino. Because the Arduino has three
GND pins, you could simply connect these two circuits exactly as shown
in each of the two figures; just hook them both up to the Arduino at the
same time. Or, you could connect one wire from the breadboard’s ground
rail to one of the GND pins on the Arduino, and then take the wires that
are connected to GND in the figures and connect them instead to the
breadboard ground rail.

If you’re not ready to try this, don’t worry: simply wire up both circuits to
your Arduino as shown in Figures 4-6 and 5-4. You’ll see an example that
uses the ground and positive breadboard rails in Chapter 6.

Getting back to this next example, if we have just one pushbutton, how
do we control the brightness of a lamp? We’re going to learn yet another
interaction design technique: detecting how long a button has been
pressed. To do this, I need to upgrade example 03C from Chapter 4 to
add dimming. The idea is to build an “interface” in which a press and
release action switches the light on and off, and a press and hold action
changes brightness.

Let’s have a look at the sketch:

58 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
// Example 05: Turn on LED when the button is pressed
// and keep it on after it is released
// including simple de-bouncing.
// If the button is held, brightness changes.

const int LED = 9; // the pin for the LED

const int BUTTON = 7; // input pin of the pushbutton

int val = 0; // stores the state of the input pin

int old_val = 0; // stores the previous value of "val"

int state = 0; // 0 = LED off while 1 = LED on

int brightness = 128; // Stores the brightness value

unsigned long startTime = 0; // when did we begin pressing?

void setup() {
pinMode(LED, OUTPUT); // tell Arduino LED is an output
pinMode(BUTTON, INPUT); // and BUTTON is an input
}

void loop() {

val = digitalRead(BUTTON); // read input value and store it

// yum, fresh

// check if there was a transition

if ((val == HIGH) && (old_val == LOW)) {

state = 1 - state; // change the state from off to on

// or vice-versa

startTime = millis(); // millis() is the Arduino clock

// it returns how many milliseconds
// have passed since the board has
// been reset.

// (this line remembers when the button

// was last pressed)
delay(10);
}

Advanced Input and Output 59

www.it-ebooks.info
 // check whether the button is being held down
if ((val == HIGH) && (old_val == HIGH)) {

// If the button is held for more than 500ms.

if (state == 1 && (millis() - startTime) > 500) {

brightness++; // increment brightness by 1

delay(10); // delay to avoid brightness going
// up too fast

if (brightness > 255) { // 255 is the max brightness

brightness = 0; // if we go over 255

// let’s go back to 0
}
}
}

old_val = val; // val is now old, let’s store it

if (state == 1) {
analogWrite(LED, brightness); // turn LED ON at the
// current brightness level
} else {
analogWrite(LED, 0); // turn LED OFF
}
}

Now try it out. As you can see, our interaction model is taking shape. If
you press the button and release it immediately, you switch the lamp on
or off. If you hold the button down, the brightness changes; just let go
when you have reached the desired brightness.

Now let’s learn how to use some more interesting sensors.

Use a Light Sensor Instead of the Pushbutton

Now we’re going to try an interesting experiment. Take a light sensor, like
the one pictured in Figure 5-5. You can get a bag of these from Maker
Shed (part number JM169578) or from bit.ly/ArduinoStoreLDR.

60 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Figure 5-5.
Light-dependent resistor (LDR)

In darkness, the resistance of a light-dependent resistor (LDR) is quite

high. When you shine some light at it, the resistance quickly drops and it
becomes a reasonably good conductor of electricity. It is thus a kind of
light-activated switch.

Build the circuit that came with Example 02 (see “Using a Pushbutton to
Control the LED” in Chapter 4), then upload the code from Example 02 to
your Arduino.

Now plug the LDR onto the breadboard instead of the pushbutton. You
will notice that if you cover the LDR with your hands, the LED turns off.
Uncover the LDR, and the light goes on. You’ve just built your first real
sensor-driven LED. This is important because for the first time in this
book, we are using an electronic component that is not a simple mechani-
cal device: it’s a real rich sensor.

Advanced Input and Output 61

www.it-ebooks.info
Analog Input
As you learned in the previous section, Arduino is able to detect whether
there is a voltage applied to one of its pins and report it through the
digitalRead() function. This kind of either/or response is fine in a lot of
applications, but the light sensor that we just used is able to tell us not
just whether there is light, but also how much light there is. This is the
difference between an on/off sensor (which tells us whether something
is there) and an analogue sensor, whose value continuously changes.
In order to read this type of sensor, we need a different type of pin.

In the lower-right part of the Arduino board, you’ll see six pins marked
“Analog In”; these are special pins that can tell us not only whether
there is a voltage applied to them, but if so, also its value. By using the
analogRead() function, we can read the voltage applied to one of the pins.
This function returns a number between 0 and 1023, which represents
voltages between 0 and 5 volts. For example, if there is a voltage of 2.5 V
applied to pin number 0, analogRead(0) returns 512.

If you now build the circuit that you see in Figure 5-6, using a 10k resistor,
and run the code listed in Example 06A, you’ll see the onboard LED
(you could also insert your own LED into pins 13 and GND as shown in
“Blinking an LED” in Chapter 4) blinking at a rate that’s dependent upon
the amount of light that hits the sensor.

62 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Figure 5-6.
An analogue sensor circuit

Advanced Input and Output 63

www.it-ebooks.info
 // Example 06A: Blink LED at a rate specified by the
// value of the analogue input

const int LED = 13; // the pin for the LED

int val = 0; // variable used to store the value

// coming from the sensor
void setup() {
pinMode(LED, OUTPUT); // LED is as an OUTPUT

// Note: Analogue pins are

// automatically set as inputs
}

void loop() {

val = analogRead(0); // read the value from

// the sensor

digitalWrite(LED, HIGH); // turn the LED on

delay(val); // stop the program for

// some time

digitalWrite(LED, LOW); // turn the LED off

delay(val); // stop the program for

// some time
}

Now, try Example 06B: but before you do, you’ll need to modify your
circuit. Take a look at Figure 5-4 again and hook the LED up to pin 9 as
shown. Because you’ve already got some stuff on the breadboard, you’ll
need to find a spot on the breadboard where the LED, wires, and resistor
won’t overlap with the LDR circuit.

64 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
 // Example 06B: Set the brightness of LED to
// a brightness specified by the
// value of the analogue input

const int LED = 9; // the pin for the LED

int val = 0; // variable used to store the value

// coming from the sensor

void setup() {

pinMode(LED, OUTPUT); // LED is as an OUTPUT

// Note: Analogue pins are

// automatically set as inputs
}

void loop() {

val = analogRead(0); // read the value from

// the sensor
analogWrite(LED, val/4); // turn the LED on at
// the brightness set
// by the sensor

delay(10); // stop the program for

// some time
}

NOTE: We specify the brightness by dividing val by 4, because

analogRead() returns a number up to 1023, and analogWrite()
accepts a maximum of 255.

Advanced Input and Output 65

www.it-ebooks.info
Try Other Analogue Sensors
Using the same circuit that you have seen in the previous section, you
can connect a lot of other resistive sensors that work in more or less the
same way. For example, you could connect a thermistor, which is a simple
device whose resistance changes with temperature. In the circuit, I have
shown you how changes in resistance become changes in voltage that
can be measured by Arduino.

If you do work with a thermistor, be aware that there isn’t a direct connec-
tion between the value you read and the actual temperature measured. If
you need an exact reading, you should read the numbers that come out of
the analogue pin while measuring with a real thermometer. You could put
these numbers side by side in a table and work out a way to calibrate the
analogue results to real-world temperatures.

Until now, we have just used an LED as an output device, but how do we
read the actual values that Arduino is reading from the sensor? We can’t
make the board blink the values in Morse code (well, we could, but there
is an easier way for humans to read the values). For this, we can have
Arduino talk to a computer over a serial port, which is described in the
next section.

Serial Communication
You learned at the beginning of this book that Arduino has a USB connec-
tion that is used by the IDE to upload code into the processor. The good
news is that this connection can also be used by the sketches that we
write in Arduino to send data back to the computer or to receive commands
from it. For this purpose, we are going to use a serial object (an object is
a collection of capabilities that are bundled together for the convenience
of people writing sketches).

This object contains all the code that we need to send and receive data.
We’re now going to use the last circuit we built with the photoresistor and
send the values that are read back to the computer. Type this code into
a new sketch (you can also download the code from www.makezine.com/
getstartedarduino):

66 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
 // Example 07: Send to the computer the values read from
// analogue input 0
// Make sure you click on "Serial Monitor"
// after you upload

const int SENSOR = 0; // select the input pin for the

// sensor resistor

int val = 0; // variable to store the value coming

// from the sensor

void setup() {

Serial.begin(9600); // open the serial port to send

// data back to the computer at
// 9600 bits per second
}

void loop() {

val = analogRead(SENSOR); // read the value from

// the sensor

Serial.println(val); // print the value to

// the serial port

delay(100); // wait 100ms between

// each send
}

After you’ve uploaded the code to your Arduino, press the “Serial
Monitor” button on the Arduino IDE (the last button in the toolbar);
you’ll see the numbers rolling past in the bottom part of the window.
Now, any software that can read from the serial port can talk to Ar-
duino. There are many programming languages that let you write
programs on your computer that can talk to the serial port. Processing
(www.processing.org) is a great complement to Arduino, because the
languages and IDEs are so similar.

Advanced Input and Output 67

www.it-ebooks.info
Driving Bigger Loads (Motors, Lamps, and the Like)
Each one of the pins on an Arduino board can be used to power devices
that use up to 20 milliamps: this is a very small amount of current, just
enough to drive an LED. If you try to drive something like a motor, the pin
will immediately stop working, and could potentially burn out the whole
processor. To drive bigger loads like motors or incandescent lamps, we
need to use an external component that can switch such things on and off
and that is driven by an Arduino pin. One such device is called a MOSFET
transistor—ignore the funny name—it’s an electronic switch that can be
driven by applying a voltage to one of its three pins, each of which is called
a gate. It is something like the light switch that we use at home, where the
action of a finger turning the light on and off is replaced by a pin on the
Arduino board sending voltage to the gate of the MOSFET.

Note: MOSFET means “metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect

transistor.” It’s a special type of transistor that operates based on the
field-effect principle. This means that electricity will flow though a
piece of semiconductor material (between the Drain and Source pins)
when a voltage is applied to the Gate pin. As the Gate is insulated from
the rest through a layer of metal oxide, there is no current flowing
from Arduino into the MOSFET, making it very simple to interface.
They are ideal for switching on and off large loads at high frequencies.

In Figure 5-7, you can see how you would use a MOSFET like the IRF520
to turn on and off a small motor attached to a fan. You will also notice
that the motor takes its power supply from the 9 V connector on the
Arduino board. This is another benefit of the MOSFET: it allows us to drive
devices whose power supply differs from the one used by Arduino. As the
MOSFET is connected to pin 9, we can also use analogWrite() to control
the speed of the motor through PWM. To build the circuit you will need
an IRF520 MOSFET (bit.ly/ArduinoStoreIRF520) and an 1N4007 diode
(bit.ly/ArduinoStore1N4007). If the motor randomly turns on during
upload, place a 10K resistor between pin 9 and GND.

Complex Sensors
We define complex sensors as those that produce a type of information
that requires a bit more than a digitalRead() or an analogRead() function
to be used. These usually are small circuits with a small microcontroller
inside that preprocesses the information. Some of the complex sensors
68 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
available include ultrasonic rangers, infrared rangers, and accelerom-
eters. You can find examples on how to use them on our website in the
“Tutorials” section (www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/HomePage).

Tom Igoe’s Making Things Talk (O’Reilly) has extensive coverage of these
sensors and many other complex sensors.

Figure 5-7.
A motor circuit for Arduino

Advanced Input and Output 69

www.it-ebooks.info
www.it-ebooks.info
6/Talking to the Cloud

In the preceding chapters, you learned the

basics of Arduino and the fundamental build-
ing blocks available to you. Let me remind you
what makes up the “Arduino Alphabet”:
Digital Output
We used it to control an LED but, with the proper circuit, it can be used to
control motors, make sounds, and a lot more.

Analog Output
This gives us the ability to control the brightness of the LED, not just turn
it on or off. We can even control the speed of a motor with it.

Digital Input
This allows us to read the state of simple sensors, like pushbuttons or tilt
switches.

Analog Input
We can read signals from sensors that send a continuous signal that’s not
just on or off, such as a potentiometer or a light sensor.

Serial Communication
This allows us to communicate with a computer and exchange data or
simply monitor what’s going on with the sketch that’s running on the Arduino.

In this chapter, we’re going to see how to put together a working application
using what you have learned in the previous chapters. This chapter should
show you how every single example can be used as a building block for a
complex project.

Here is where the wannabe designer in me comes out. We’re going to

make the twenty-first-century version of a classic lamp by my favourite
Italian designer, Joe Colombo. The object we’re going to build is inspired
by a lamp called “Aton” from 1964.

Talking to the Cloud 71

www.it-ebooks.info
Figure 6-1.
The finished lamp

The lamp, as you can see in Figure 6-1, is a simple sphere sitting on a base
with a large hole to keep the sphere from rolling off your desk. This design
allows you to orient the lamp in different directions.

In terms of functionality, we want to build a device that would connect

to the Internet, fetch the current list of articles on the Make blog (blog.
makezine.com) and count how many times the words “peace”, “love”,
and “Arduino” are mentioned. With these values, we’re going to generate
a colour and display it on the lamp. The lamp itself has a button we can
use to turn it on and off, and a light sensor for automatic activation.

72 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Planning
Let’s look at what we want to achieve and what bits and pieces we need.
First of all, we need Arduino to be able to connect to the Internet. As the
Arduino board has only a USB port, we can’t plug it directly into an Internet
connection, so we need to figure out how to bridge the two. Usually what
people do is run an application on a computer that will connect to the
Internet, process the data, and send Arduino some simple bit of distilled
information.

Arduino is a simple computer with a small memory; it can’t process large

files easily, and when we connect to an RSS feed we’ll get a very verbose
XML file that would require a lot more RAM. We’ll implement a proxy to
simplify the XML using the Processing language.

Processing
Processing is where Arduino came from. We love this language and
use it to teach programming to beginners as well as to build beautiful
code. Processing and Arduino are the perfect combination. Another
advantage is that Processing is open source and runs on all the major
platforms (Mac, Linux, and Windows). It can also generate stand-
alone applications that run on those platforms. What’s more, the Pro-
cessing community is lively and helpful, and you can find thousands
of premade example programs.

The proxy does the following work for us: it downloads the RSS feed from
makezine.com and extracts all the words from the resulting XML file.
Then, going through all of them, it counts the number of times “peace”,
“love”, and “Arduino” appear in the text. With these three numbers, we’ll
calculate a colour value and send it to Arduino. The board will send back
the amount of light measured by the sensor and show it on the computer
screen.

On the hardware side, we’ll combine the pushbutton example, the light
sensor example, the PWM LED control (multiplied by 3!) and serial
communication.

As Arduino is a simple device, we’ll need to codify the colour in a simple

way. We’ll use the standard way that colours are represented in HTML: #
followed by six hexadecimal digits.

Hexadecimal numbers are handy, because each 8-bit number is stored in

exactly two characters; with decimal numbers this varies from one to three

Talking to the Cloud 73

www.it-ebooks.info
characters. Predictability also makes the code simpler: we wait until we see an
#, then we read the six characters that follow into a buffer (a variable used as
a temporary holding area for data). Finally, we turn each group of two charac-
ters into a byte that represents the brightness of one of the three LEDs.

Coding
There are two sketches that you’ll be running: one Processing sketch, and
one Arduino sketch. Here is the code for the Processing sketch. You can
download it from www.makezine.com/getstartedarduino.

// Example 08A: Arduino networked lamp

// parts of the code are inspired
// by a blog post by Tod E. Kurt (todbot.com)

import processing.serial.*;

String feed = "http://blog.makezine.com/index.xml";

int interval = 10; // retrieve feed every 60 seconds;

int lastTime; // the last time we fetched the content

int love = 0;
int peace = 0;
int arduino = 0;

int light = 0; // light level measured by the lamp

Serial port;
color c;
String cs;

String buffer = ""; // Accumulates characters coming from Arduino

PFont font;

void setup() {
size(640,480);
frameRate(10); // we don't need fast updates

font = loadFont("HelveticaNeue-Bold-32.vlw");
fill(255);
textFont(font, 32);

74 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
 // IMPORTANT NOTE:
// The first serial port retrieved by Serial.list()
// should be your Arduino. If not, uncomment the next
// line by deleting the // before it, and re-run the
// sketch to see a list of serial ports. Then, change
// the 0 in between [ and ] to the number of the port
// that your Arduino is connected to.
//println(Serial.list());
String arduinoPort = Serial.list()[0];
port = new Serial(this, arduinoPort, 9600); // connect to Arduino

lastTime = 0;
fetchData();
}

void draw() {
background( c );
int n = (interval - ((millis()-lastTime)/1000));

// Build a colour based on the 3 values

c = color(peace, love, arduino);
cs = "#" + hex(c,6); // Prepare a string to be sent to Arduino

text("Arduino Networked Lamp", 10,40);

text("Reading feed:", 10, 100);
text(feed, 10, 140);

text("Next update in "+ n + " seconds",10,450);

text("peace" ,10,200);
text(" " + peace, 130, 200);
rect(200,172, peace, 28);

text("love ",10,240);
text(" " + love, 130, 240);
rect(200,212, love, 28);

text("arduino ",10,280);
text(" " + arduino, 130, 280);
rect(200,252, arduino, 28);

// write the colour string to the screen

text("sending", 10, 340);
text(cs, 200,340);

Talking to the Cloud 75

www.it-ebooks.info
 text("light level", 10, 380);
rect(200, 352,light/10.23,28); // this turns 1023 into 100

if (n <= 0) {
fetchData();
lastTime = millis();
}

port.write(cs); // send data to Arduino

if (port.available() > 0) { // check if there is data waiting

int inByte = port.read(); // read one byte
if (inByte != 10) { // if byte is not newline
buffer = buffer + char(inByte); // just add it to the buffer
}
else {

// newline reached, let's process the data

if (buffer.length() > 1) { // make sure there is enough data

// chop off the last character, it's a carriage return

// (a carriage return is the character at the end of a
// line of text)
buffer = buffer.substring(0,buffer.length() -1);

// turn the buffer from string into an integer number

light = int(buffer);

// clean the buffer for the next read cycle

buffer = "";

// We're likely falling behind in taking readings

// from Arduino. So let's clear the backlog of
// incoming sensor readings so the next reading is
// up-to-date.
port.clear();
}
}
}

76 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
void fetchData() {
// we use these strings to parse the feed
String data;
String chunk;

// zero the counters

love = 0;
peace = 0;
arduino = 0;
try {
URL url = new URL(feed); // An object to represent the URL
// prepare a connection
URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
conn.connect(); // now connect to the Website

// this is a bit of virtual plumbing as we connect

// the data coming from the connection to a buffered
// reader that reads the data one line at a time.
BufferedReader in = new
BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));

// read each line from the feed

while ((data = in.readLine()) != null) {

StringTokenizer st =
new StringTokenizer(data,"\"<>,.()[] ");// break it down
while (st.hasMoreTokens()) {
// each chunk of data is made lowercase
chunk= st.nextToken().toLowerCase() ;

if (chunk.indexOf("love") >= 0 ) // found "love"?

love++; // increment love by 1
if (chunk.indexOf("peace") >= 0) // found "peace"?
peace++; // increment peace by 1
if (chunk.indexOf("arduino") >= 0) // found "arduino"?
arduino++; // increment arduino by 1
}
}

// Set 64 to be the maximum number of references we care about.

if (peace > 64) peace = 64;
if (love > 64) love = 64;
if (arduino > 64) arduino = 64;

Talking to the Cloud 77

www.it-ebooks.info
 peace = peace * 4; // multiply by 4 so that the max is 255,
love = love * 4; // which comes in handy when building a
arduino = arduino * 4; // colour that is made of 4 bytes (ARGB)
}
catch (Exception ex) { // If there was an error, stop the sketch
ex.printStackTrace();
System.out.println("ERROR: "+ex.getMessage());
}

There are two things you need to do before the Processing sketch will run
correctly. First, you need to tell Processing to generate the font that we
are using for the sketch. To do this, create and save this sketch. Then, with
the sketch still opened, click Processing’s Tools menu, then select Create
Font. Select the font named HelveticaNeue-Bold, choose 32 for the font
size, and then click OK.

Second, you will need to confirm that the sketch is using the correct serial
port for talking to Arduino. You’ll need to wait until you’ve assembled the
Arduino circuit and uploaded the Arduino sketch before you can confirm
this. On most systems, this Processing sketch will run fine. However, if
you don’t see anything happening on the Arduino and you don’t see any
information from the light sensor appearing onscreen, find the comment
labeled “IMPORTANT NOTE” in the Processing sketch and follow the
instructions there.

Here is the Arduino sketch (also available at www.makezine.com/

getstartedarduino):

78 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
// Example 08B: Arduino Networked Lamp
const int SENSOR = 0;
const int R_LED = 9;
const int G_LED = 10;
const int B_LED = 11;
const int BUTTON = 12;

int val = 0; // variable to store the value coming from the sensor

int btn = LOW;

int old_btn = LOW;
int state = 0;
char buffer[7] ;
int pointer = 0;
byte inByte = 0;

byte r = 0;
byte g = 0;
byte b = 0;

void setup() {
Serial.begin(9600); // open the serial port
pinMode(BUTTON, INPUT);
}

void loop() {
val = analogRead(SENSOR); // read the value from the sensor
Serial.println(val); // print the value to
// the serial port

if (Serial.available() >0) {

// read the incoming byte:

inByte = Serial.read();

// If the marker's found, next 6 characters are the colour

if (inByte == '#') {

while (pointer < 6) { // accumulate 6 chars

buffer[pointer] = Serial.read(); // store in the buffer
pointer++; // move the pointer forward by 1
}

Talking to the Cloud 79

www.it-ebooks.info
 // now we have the 3 numbers stored as hex numbers
// we need to decode them into 3 bytes r, g and b
r = hex2dec(buffer[1]) + hex2dec(buffer[0]) * 16;
g = hex2dec(buffer[3]) + hex2dec(buffer[2]) * 16;
b = hex2dec(buffer[5]) + hex2dec(buffer[4]) * 16;

pointer = 0; // reset the pointer so we can reuse the buffer

}
}

btn = digitalRead(BUTTON); // read input value and store it

// Check if there was a transition

if ((btn == HIGH) && (old_btn == LOW)){
state = 1 - state;
}

old_btn = btn; // val is now old, let's store it

if (state == 1) { // if the lamp is on

analogWrite(R_LED, r); // turn the leds on

analogWrite(G_LED, g); // at the colour
analogWrite(B_LED, b); // sent by the computer
} else {

analogWrite(R_LED, 0); // otherwise turn off

analogWrite(G_LED, 0);
analogWrite(B_LED, 0);
}

delay(100); // wait 100ms between each send

}

int hex2dec(byte c) { // converts one HEX character into a number

if (c >= '0' && c <= '9') {
return c - '0';
} else if (c >= 'A' && c <= 'F') {
return c - 'A' + 10;
}
}

80 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Assembling the Circuit
Figure 6-2 shows how to assemble the circuit. You need to use 10K resis-
tors for all of the resistors shown in the diagram, although you could get
away with lower values for the resistors connected to the LEDs.

Remember from the PWM example in Chapter 5 that LEDs are polarized:
in this circuit, the long pin (positive) should go to the right, and the short
pin (negative) to the left. (Most LEDs have a flattened negative side, as
shown in the figure.)

Figure 6-2.
The “Arduino Networked Lamp” circuit

Talking to the Cloud 81

www.it-ebooks.info
Build the circuit as shown, using one red, one green, and one blue LED.
Next, load the sketches into Arduino and Processing, then run the
sketches and try it out. If you run into any problems, check Chapter 7,
“Troubleshooting”.

Now let’s complete the construction by placing the breadboard into a

glass sphere. The simplest and cheapest way to do this is to buy an IKEA
“FADO” table lamp. It’s now selling for about US$19.99/€14.99/£11.99
(ahh, the luxury of being European).

Instead of using three separate LEDs, you can use a single RGB LED,
which has four leads coming off it. You’ll hook it up in much the same
way as the LEDs shown in Figure 6-2, with one change: instead of three
separate connections to the ground pin on Arduino, you’ll have a single
lead (called the “common cathode”) going to ground.

The Arduino Store sells a 4-lead RGB LED for a few dollars
(bit.ly/ArduinoStoreRGBLed). Also, unlike discrete single-color LEDs, the
longest lead on this RGB LED is the one that goes to ground. The three
shorter leads will need to connect to Arduino pins 9, 10, and 11 (with a
resistor between the leads and the pins, just as with the separate red,
green, and blue LEDs).

Here’s How to Assemble It

Unpack the lamp and remove the cable that goes into the lamp from the
bottom. You will no longer be plugging this into the wall.

Strap the Arduino on a breadboard and hot-glue the breadboard onto the
back of the lamp.

Solder longer wires to the RGB LED and glue it where the lightbulb used to
be. Connect the wires coming from the LED to the breadboard (where it
was connected before you removed it). Remember that you will only need
one connection to ground if you are using a 4-lead RGB LED.

Either find a nice piece of wood with a hole that can be used as a stand
for the sphere or just cut the top of the cardboard box that came with the
lamp at approximately 5cm (or 2") and make a hole with a diameter that
cradles the lamp. Reinforce the inside of the cardboard box by using hot
glue all along the inside edges, which will make the base more stable.

82 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Place the sphere on the stand and bring the USB cable out of the top and
connect it to the computer.

Fire off your Processing code, press the on/off button, and watch the
lamp come to life.

As an exercise, try to add code that will turn on the lamp when the room
gets dark. Other possible enhancements are:

» Add tilt sensors to turn the lamp on or off by rotating it in different

directions.

» Add a small PIR sensor to detect when somebody is around and turn it
off when nobody is there to watch.

» Create different modes so that you can get manual control of the
colour or make it fade through many colours.

Think of different things, experiment, and have fun!

Talking to the Cloud 83

www.it-ebooks.info
www.it-ebooks.info
7/Troubleshooting
There will come a moment in your experimen-
tation when nothing will be working and you
will have to figure out how to fix it. Troubleshoot-
ing and debugging are ancient arts in which
there are a few simple rules, but most of the
results are obtained through a lot of work.
The more you work with electronics and Arduino, the more you will learn
and gain experience, which will ultimately make the process less painful.
Don’t be discouraged by the problems that you will find—it’s all easier
than it seems at the beginning.

As every Arduino-based project is made both of hardware and software,

there will be more than one place to look if something goes wrong. While
looking for a bug, you should operate along three lines:

Understanding
Try to understand as much as possible how the parts that you’re using
work and how they’re supposed to contribute to the finished project.
This approach will allow you to devise some way to test each component
separately.

Simplification and segmentation

The Ancient Romans used to say divide et impera: divide and rule. Try
to break down (mentally) the project into its components by using the
understanding you have and figure out where the responsibility of each
component begins and ends.

Exclusion and certainty

While investigating, test each component separately so that you can be
absolutely certain that each one works by itself. You will gradually build
up confidence about which parts of project are doing their job and which
ones are dubious.

Troubleshooting 85

www.it-ebooks.info
Debugging is the term used to describe this process as applied to software.
The legend says it was used for the first time by Grace Hopper back in the
1940s, when computers where mostly electromechanical, and one of them
stopped working because actual insects got caught in the mechanisms.

Many of today’s bugs are not physical anymore: they’re virtual and invis-
ible, at least in part. Therefore they require a sometimes lengthy and
boring process to be identified.

Testing the Board

What if the very first example, “blink an LED,” didn’t work? Wouldn’t that
be a bit depressing? Let’s figure out what to do.

Before you start blaming your project, you should make sure that a few
things are in order, as airline pilots do when they go through a checklist
to make sure that the airplane will be flying properly before takeoff:

Plug your Arduino into a USB plug on your computer.

»» Make sure the computer is on (yes, it sounds silly, but it has

happened). If the green light marked PWR turns on, this means that
the computer is powering the board. If the LED seems very faint,
something is wrong with the power: try a different USB cable and
inspect the computer’s USB port and the Arduino’s USB plug to see
whether there is any damage. If all else fails, try a different USB port
on your computer or a different computer entirely.

»» If the Arduino is brand new, the yellow LED marked L will start blink-
ing in a bit of a nervous pattern; this is the test program that was
loaded at the factory to test the board.

»» If you have been using an external power supply and are using an old
Arduino (Extreme, NG, or Diecimila), make sure that the power sup-
ply is plugged in and that the jumper marked SV1 is connecting the
two pins that are nearest to the external power supply connector.

NOTE: When you are having trouble with other sketches and need to
confirm that the board is functioning, open the first “blink an LED”
example in the Arduino IDE and upload it to the board. The on-board
LED should blink in a regular pattern.

86 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
If you have gone through all these steps successfully, then you can be
confident that your Arduino is working correctly.

Testing Your Breadboarded Circuit

Now connect the board to your breadboard by running a jumper from the
5 V and GND connections to the positive and negative rails of the bread-
board. If the green PWR LED turns off, remove the wires immediately. This
means there is a big mistake in your circuit and you have a “short circuit”
somewhere. When this happens, your board draws too much current and
the power gets cut off to protect the computer.

NOTE: If you’re a concerned that you may damage your computer,

remember that on many computers, the current protection is usually
quite good and responds quickly. Also, the Arduino board is fitted with
a “PolyFuse,” a current-protection device that resets itself when the
fault is removed.

If you’re really paranoid, you can always connect the Arduino board
through a self-powered USB hub. In this case, if it all goes horribly
wrong, the USB hub is the one that will be pushing up daisies, not your
computer.

If you’re getting a short circuit, you have to start the “simplification and
segmentation” process. What you must do is go through every sensor in
the project and connect just one at a time.

The first thing to start from is always the power supply (the connections
from 5 V and GND). Look around and make sure that each part of the
circuit is powered properly.

Working step by step and making one single modification at a time is the
number one rule for fixing stuff. This rule was hammered into my young
head by my school professor and first employer, Maurizio Pirola. Every
time I’m debugging something and things don’t look good (and believe
me, it happens a lot), his face pops in my head saying “one modification
at a time … one modification at a time” and that’s usually when I fix
everything. This is very important, because you will know what fixed
the problem (it’s all too easy to lose track of which modification actually
solved the problem, which is why it’s so important to make one at a time).

Troubleshooting 87

www.it-ebooks.info
Each debugging experience will build up in your head a “knowledge base”
of defects and possible fixes. And before you know it, you’ll become
an expert. This will make you look very cool, because as soon as a newbie
says “This doesn’t work!” you’ll give it a quick look and have the answer
in a split second.

Isolating Problems
Another important rule is to find a reliable way to reproduce a problem.
If your circuit behaves in a funny way at random times, try really hard to
figure out the exact moment the problem occurs and what is causing it.
This process will allow you to think about a possible cause. It is also very
useful when you need to explain to somebody else what’s going on.

Describing the problem as precisely as possible is also a good way to find

a solution. Try to find somebody to explain the problem to—in many cases,
a solution will pop into your head as you articulate the problem. Brian W.
Kernighan and Rob Pike, in The Practice of Programming (Addison-Wesley,
1999), tell the story of one university that “kept a teddy bear near the help
desk. Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the
bear before they could speak to a human counselor.”

Problems with the IDE

In some cases, you may have a problem using the Arduino IDE, particularly
on Windows.

If you get an error when you double-click on the Arduino icon, or if nothing
happens, try double-clicking the run.bat file as an alternative method to
launch Arduino.

Windows users may also run into a problem if the operating system assigns
a COM port number of COM10 or greater to Arduino. If this happens, you
can usually convince Windows to assign a lower port number to Arduino.
First, open up the Device Manager by clicking the Start menu, right-
clicking on Computer (Vista) or My Computer (XP), and choosing Prop-
erties. On Windows XP, click Hardware and choose Device Manager. On
Vista, click on Device Manager (it appears in the list of tasks on the left
of the window).

Look for the serial devices in the list under “Ports (COM & LPT).” Find a serial
device that you’re not using that is numbered COM9 or lower. Right-click it
and choose Properties from the menu. Then, choose the Port Settings tab

88 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
and click Advanced. Set the COM port number to COM10 or higher, click OK
and click OK again to dismiss the Properties dialog.

Now, do the same with the USB Serial Port device that represents Arduino,
with one change: assign it the COM port number (COM9 or lower) that
you just freed up.

If these suggestions don’t help, or if you’re having a problem not described

here, check out the Arduino troubleshooting page at www.arduino.cc/en/
Guide/Troubleshooting.

How to Get Help Online

If you are stuck, don’t spend days running around alone—ask for help.
One of the best things about Arduino is its community. You can always
find help if you can describe your problem well.

Get the habit of cutting and pasting things into a search engine and see
whether somebody is talking about it. For example, when the Arduino IDE
spits out a nasty error message, copy and paste it into a Google search
and see what comes out. Do the same with bits of code you’re working on
or just a specific function name. Look around you: everything has been
invented already and it’s stored somewhere on a web page.

For further investigation, start from the www.arduino.cc main website

and look at the FAQ (www.arduino.cc/en/Main/FAQ), then move on to
the playground (www.arduino.cc/playground), a freely editable wiki that
any user can modify to contribute documentation. It’s one of the best
parts of the whole open source philosophy. People contribute documen-
tation and examples of anything you can do with Arduino. Before you
start a project, search the playground and you’ll find a bit of code or a
circuit diagram to get you started.

If you still can’t find an answer that way, search the forum (www.arduino.cc/
cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl). If that doesn’t help, post a question there. Pick
the correct board for your problem: there are different areas for software
or hardware issues and even forums in five different languages. Please
post as much information as you can:

»» What Arduino board are you using?

»» What operating system are you using to run the Arduino IDE?

Troubleshooting 89

www.it-ebooks.info
»» Give a general description of what you’re trying to do. Post links to
datasheets of strange parts you’re using.

The number of answers you get depends on how well you formulate your
question.

Your chances increase if you avoid these things at all cost (these rules
are good for any online forums, not just Arduino’s):

»» Typing your message all in CAPITALS. It annoys people a lot and is

like walking around with “newbie” tattooed on your forehead (in on-
line communities, typing in all capitals is considered “shouting”).

»» Posting the same message in several different parts of the forum.

»» “Bumping” your message by posting follow-up comments asking

“Hey, how come no one replied?” or even worse, simply posting the
text “bump.” If you didn’t get a reply, take a look at your posting. Was
the subject clear? Did you provide a well-worded description of the
problem you are having? Were you nice? Always be nice.

»» Writing messages like “I want to build a space shuttle using arduino

how do I do that”. This means that you want people to do your work
for you, and this approach is simply not fun for a real tinkerer. It’s
better to explain what you want to build and then ask a specific
question about one part of the project and take it from there.

»» A variation of the previous point is when the question is clearly

something the poster of the message is getting paid to do. If you ask
specific questions people are happy to help, but if you ask them to do
all your work (and you don’t share the money), the response is likely
to be less nice.

»» Posting messages that look suspiciously like school assignments and

asking the forum to do your homework. Professors like me roam the
forums and slap such students with a large trout.

90 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Appendix A/
The Breadboard
The process of getting a circuit to work involves making lots of changes to it
until it behaves properly; it’s a very fast, iterative process that’s something
like an electronic equivalent to sketching. The design evolves in your hands
as you try different combinations. For the best results, use a system that
allows you to change the connections between components in the fastest,
most practical, and least destructive way. These requirements clearly rule
out soldering, which is a time-consuming procedure that puts components
under stress every time you heat them up and cool them down.

The answer to this problem is a very practical device called the solderless
breadboard. As you can see from Figure A-1, it’s a small plastic board full
of holes, each of which contains a spring-loaded contact. You can push
a component’s leg into one of the holes, and it will establish an electrical
connection with all of the other holes in the same vertical column of holes.
Each hole is a distance of 2.54 mm from the others.

Because most of the components have their legs (known to techies as

“pins”) spaced at that standard distance, chips with multiple legs fit
nicely. Not all of the contacts on a breadboard are created equal—there
are some differences. The top and bottom rows (coloured in red and
blue and marked with + and –) are connected horizontally and are used
to carry the power across the board so that when you need power or
ground, you can provide it very quickly with a jumper (a short piece of
wire used to connect two points in the circuits). The last thing you need to
know about breadboards is that in the middle, there is a large gap that is
as wide as the size of a small chip. Each vertical line of holes is interrupted
in the middle, so that when you plug in a chip, you don’t short-circuit the
pins that are on the two sides of the chip. Clever, eh?

Appendix A 91

www.it-ebooks.info
Figure A-1.
The solderless breadboard

92 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Appendix B/Reading
Resistors and Capacitors
In order to use electronic parts, you need to be able to identify them,
which can be a difficult task for a beginner. Most of the resistors that you
find in a shop have a cylindrical body with two legs sticking out and have
strange coloured markings all around them. When the first commercial
resistors were made, there was no way to print numbers small enough
to fit on their body, so clever engineers decided that they could just
represent the values with strips of coloured paint.

Today’s beginners have to figure out a way to interpret these signs. The
“key” is quite simple: generally, there are four stripes, and each colour
represents a number. One of rings is usually gold-coloured; this one
represents the precision of that resistor. To read the stripes in order, hold
the resistor so the gold (or silver in some cases) stripe is to the right.
Then, read the colours and map them to the corresponding numbers. In
the following table, you’ll find a translation between the colours and their
numeric values.

Colour Value
Black 0
Brown 1
Red 2
Orange 3
Yellow 4
Green 5
Blue 6
Violet 7
Grey 8
White 9
Silver 10%
Gold 5%

For example, brown, black, orange, and gold markings mean 1 0 3 ±5%.
Easy, right? Not quite, because there is a twist: the third ring actually
represents the number of zeros in the value. Therefore 1 0 3 is actually 1
0 followed by 3 zeros, so the end result is 10,000 ohms ±5%. Electronics
geeks tend to shorten values by expressing them in kilo ohm (for thousands

Appendix B 93

www.it-ebooks.info
of ohms) and mega ohms (for millions of ohms), so a 10,000 ohm resistor
is usually shortened to 10k, while 10,000,000 becomes 10M. Please note
that because engineers are fond of optimising everything, on some sche-
matic diagrams you might find values expressed as 4k7, which means 4.7
kilo ohms, or 4700.

Capacitors are a bit easier: the barrel-shaped capacitors (electrolytic ca-

pacitors) generally have their values printed on them. A capacitor’s value
is measured in farads (F), but most capacitors that you encounter will be
measured in micro farads (µF). So if you see a capacitor labelled 100 µF,
it’s a 100 micro farad capacitor.

Many of the disc-shaped capacitors (ceramic capacitors) do not have

their units listed, and use a three-digit numeric code indicating the
number of pico farads (pF). There are 1,000,000 pF in one µF. Similar to
the resistor codes, you use the third number to determine the number
of zeros to put after the first two, with one difference: if you see 0–5,
that indicates the number of zeros. 6 and 7 are not used, and 8 and 9 are
handled differently. If you see 8, multiply the number that the first two
digits form by 0.01, and if you see 9, multiply it by 0.1.

So, a capacitor labelled 104 would be 100,000 pF or 0.1 µF. A capacitor

labeled 229 would be 2.2 pF.

94 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Appendix C/Arduino
Quick Reference
Here is a quick explanation of all the standard instructions supported
by the Arduino language.

For a more detailed reference, see: arduino.cc/en/Reference/HomePage

Structure
An Arduino sketch runs in two parts:

void setup()
This is where you place the initialisation code—the instructions that set
up the board before the main loop of the sketch starts.

void loop()
This contains the main code of your sketch. It contains a set of instruc-
tions that get repeated over and over until the board is switched off.

Special symbols
Arduino includes a number of symbols to delineate lines of code, com-
ments, and blocks of code.

; (semicolon)
Every instruction (line of code) is terminated by a semicolon. This syntax
lets you format the code freely. You could even put two instructions on
the same line, as long as you separate them with a semicolon. (However,
this would make the code harder to read.)

Example:
delay(100);

{} (curly braces)
This is used to mark blocks of code. For example, when you write code for
the loop() function, you have to use curly braces before and after the code.

Example:
void loop() {
Serial.println("ciao");
}

Appendix C 95

www.it-ebooks.info
comments
These are portions of text ignored by the Arduino processor, but are ex-
tremely useful to remind yourself (or others) of what a piece of code does.

There are two styles of comments in Arduino:

// single-line: this text is ignored until the end of the line
/* multiple-line:
you can write
a whole poem in here
*/

Constants
Arduino includes a set of predefined keywords with special values.
HIGH and LOW are used, for example, when you want to turn on or off
an Arduino pin. INPUT and OUTPUT are used to set a specific pin to be
either and input or an output

true and false indicate exactly what their names suggest: the truth or
falsehood of a condition or expression.

Variables
Variables are named areas of the Arduino’s memory where you can
store data that you can use and manipulate in your sketch. As the name
suggests, they can be changed as many times as you like.

Because Arduino is a very simple processor, when you declare a variable

you have to specify its type. This means telling the processor the size of
the value you want to store.

Here are the datatypes that are available:

boolean
Can have one of two values: true or false.

char
Holds a single character, such as A. Like any computer, Arduino stores
it as a number, even though you see text. When chars are used to store
numbers, they can hold values from –128 to 127.

96 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
NOTE: There are two major sets of characters available on computer
systems: ASCII and UNICODE. ASCII is a set of 127 characters that
was used for, among other things, transmitting text between serial
terminals and time-shared computer systems such as mainframes
and minicomputers. UNICODE is a much larger set of values used by
modern computer operating systems to represent characters in a
wide range of languages. ASCII is still useful for exchanging short bits
of information in languages such as Italian or English that use Latin
characters, Arabic numerals, and common typewriter symbols for
punctuation and the like.

byte
Holds a number between 0 and 255. As with chars, bytes use only one
byte of memory.

int
Uses 2 bytes of memory to represent a number between –32,768 and
32,767; it’s the most common data type used in Arduino.

unsigned int
Like int, uses 2 bytes but the unsigned prefix means that it can’t store
negative numbers, so its range goes from 0 to 65,535.

long
This is twice the size of an int and holds numbers from –2,147,483,648 to
2,147,483,647.

unsigned long
Unsigned version of long; it goes from 0 to 4,294,967,295.

float
This quite big and can hold floating-point values, a fancy way of saying
that you can use it to store numbers with a decimal point in it. It will eat up
4 bytes of your precious RAM and the functions that can handle them use
up a lot of code memory as well. So use floats sparingly.

double
Double-precision floating-point number, with a maximum value of
1.7976931348623157 x 10308. Wow, that’s huge!

string
A set of ASCII characters that are used to store textual information (you
might use a string to send a message via a serial port, or to display on

Appendix C 97

www.it-ebooks.info
an LCD display). For storage, they use one byte for each character in the
string, plus a null character to tell Arduino that it’s the end of the string.
The following are equivalent:
char string1[] = "Arduino"; // 7 chars + 1 null char
char string2[8] = "Arduino"; // Same as above

array
A list of variables that can be accessed via an index. They are used to
build tables of values that can easily be accessed. For example, if you
want to store different levels of brightness to be used when fading an LED,
you could create six variables called light01, light02, and so on. Better yet,
you could use a simple array like:
int light[6] = {0, 20, 50, 75, 100};

The word “array” is not actually used in the variable declaration: the
symbols [] and {} do the job.

Control Structures
Arduino includes keywords for controlling the logical flow of your sketch.

if . . . else
This structure makes decisions in your program. if must be followed by
a question specified as an expression contained in parentheses. If the
expression is true, whatever follows will be executed. If it’s false, the block
of code following else will be executed. It’s possible to use just if without
providing an else clause.

Example:
if (val == 1) {
digitalWrite(LED,HIGH);
}

for
Lets you repeat a block of code a specified number of times.

Example:
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
Serial.print("ciao");
}

switch case
The if statement is like a fork in the road for your program. switch case is
like a massive roundabout. It lets your program take a variety of directions
98 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
depending on the value of a variable. It’s quite useful to keep your code
tidy as it replaces long lists of if statements.

Example:
switch (sensorValue) {
case 23:
digitalWrite(13,HIGH);
break;
case 46:
digitalWrite(12,HIGH);
break;
default: // if nothing matches this is executed
digitalWrite(12,LOW);
digitalWrite(13,LOW);
}

while
Similar to if, this executes a block of code while a certain condition is true.

Example:
// blink LED while sensor is below 512
sensorValue = analogRead(1);
while (sensorValue < 512) {
digitalWrite(13,HIGH);
delay(100);
digitalWrite(13,HIGH);
delay(100);
sensorValue = analogRead(1);
}

do . . . while
Just like while, except that the code is run just before the the condition
is evaluated. This structure is used when you want the code inside your
block to run at least once before you check the condition.

Example:

do {
digitalWrite(13,HIGH);
delay(100);
digitalWrite(13,HIGH);
delay(100);
sensorValue = analogRead(1);
} while (sensorValue < 512);

Appendix C 99

www.it-ebooks.info
break
This term lets you leave a loop and continue the execution of the code
that appears after the loop. It’s also used to separate the different sections
of a switch case statement.

Example:
// blink LED while sensor is below 512
do {
// Leaves the loop if a button is pressed
if (digitalRead(7) == HIGH)
break;
digitalWrite(13,HIGH);
delay(100);
digitalWrite(13,LOW);
delay(100);
sensorValue = analogRead(1);
} while (sensorValue < 512);

continue
When used inside a loop, continue lets you skip the rest of the code inside
it and force the condition to be tested again.

Example:
for (light = 0; light < 255; light++)
{
// skip intensities between 140 and 200
if ((x > 140) && (x < 200))
continue;
analogWrite(PWMpin, light);
delay(10);
}

return
Stops running a function and returns from it. You can also use this to
return a value from inside a function.

For example, if you have a function called computeTemperature() and you

want to return the result to the part of your code that invoked the function
you would write something like:
int computeTemperature() {
int temperature = 0;
temperature = (analogRead(0) + 45) / 100;
return temperature;
}

100 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Arithmetic and formulas
You can use Arduino to make complex calculations using a special syntax.
+ and – work like you’ve learned in school, and multiplication is represent-
ed with an * and division with a /.

There is an additional operator called “modulo” (%), which returns

the remainder of an integer division. You can use as many levels of
parentheses as necessary to group expressions. Contrary to what you
might have learned in school, square brackets and curly brackets are
reserved for other purposes (array indexes and blocks, respectively).

Examples:
a = 2 + 2;
light = ((12 * sensorValue) - 5 ) / 2;
remainder = 3 % 2; // returns 1

Comparison Operators
When you specify conditions or tests for if, while, and for statements,
these are the operators you can use:

== equal to
!= not equal to
< less than
> greater than
<= less than or equal to
>= greater than or equal to

Boolean Operators
These are used when you want to combine multiple conditions. For example,
if you want to check whether the value coming from a sensor is between 5
and 10, you would write:

if ((sensor => 5) && (sensor <=10))

There are three operators: and, represented with &&; or, represented with
||; and finally not, represented with !.

Compound Operators
These are special operators used to make code more concise for some
very common operations like incrementing a value.

Appendix C 101

www.it-ebooks.info
For example, to increment value by 1 you would write:

value = value +1;

but using a compound operator, this becomes:

value++;

increment and decrement (–– and ++)

These increment or decrement a value by 1. Be careful: if you write i++
this increments i by 1 and evaluates to the equivalent of i+1; ++i evaluates
to the value of i and then increments i. The same applies to ––.

+= , –=, *= and /=
These make it shorter to write certain expressions. The following two
expressions are equivalent:

a = a + 5;
a += 5;

Input and output functions

Arduino includes functions for handling input and output. You’ve already
seen some of these in the example programs throughout the book.

pinMode(pin, mode)
Reconfigures a digital pin to behave either as an input or an output.

Example:
pinMode(7,INPUT); // turns pin 7 into an input

digitalWrite(pin, value)
Turns a digital pin either on or off. Pins must be explicitly made into an
output using pinMode before digitalWrite will have any effect.

Example:
digitalWrite(8,HIGH); // turns on digital pin 8

int digitalRead(pin)
Reads the state of an input pin, returns HIGH if the pin senses some
voltage or LOW if there is no voltage applied.

Example:
val = digitalRead(7); // reads pin 7 into val

102 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
int analogRead(pin)
Reads the voltage applied to an analog input pin and returns a number
between 0 and 1023 that represents the voltages between 0 and 5 V.

Example:
val = analogRead(0); // reads analog input 0 into val

analogWrite(pin, value)
Changes the PWM rate on one of the pins marked PWM. pin may be 11,10,
9, 6, 5, 3. value may be a number between 0 and 255 that represents the
scale between 0 and 5 V output voltage.

Example:
analogWrite(9,128); // Dim an LED on pin 9 to 50%

shiftOut(dataPin, clockPin, bitOrder, value)

Sends data to a shift register, devices that are used to expand the number
of digital outputs. This protocol uses one pin for data and one for clock.
bitOrder indicates the ordering of bytes (least significant or most
significant) and value is the actual byte to be sent out.

Example:
shiftOut(dataPin, clockPin, LSBFIRST, 255);

unsigned long pulseIn(pin, value)

Measures the duration of a pulse coming in on one of the digital inputs.
This is useful, for example, to read some infrared sensors or accelerom-
eters that output their value as pulses of changing duration.

Example:
time = pulsein(7,HIGH); // measures the time the next
// pulse stays high

Time functions
Arduino includes functions for measuring elapsed time and also for pausing
the sketch.

unsigned long millis()

Returns the number of milliseconds that have passed since the sketch
started.

Example:
duration = millis()-lastTime; // computes time elapsed since "lastTime"

Appendix C 103

www.it-ebooks.info
delay(ms)
Pauses the program for the amount of milliseconds specified.

Example:
delay(500); // stops the program for half a second

delayMicroseconds(us)
Pauses the program for the given amount of microseconds.

Example:
delayMicroseconds(1000); // waits for 1 millisecond

Math functions
Arduino includes many common mathematical and trigonometric
functions:

min(x, y)
Returns the smaller of x and y.

Example:
val = min(10,20); // val is now 10

max(x, y)
Returns the larger of x and y.

Example:
val = max(10,20); // val is now 20

abs(x)
Returns the absolute value of x, which turns negative numbers into
positive. If x is 5 it will return 5, but if x is –5, it will still return 5.

Example:
val = abs(-5); // val is now 5

constrain(x, a, b)
Returns the value of x, constrained between a and b. If x is less than a, it
will just return a and if x is greater than b, it will just return b.

Example:
val = constrain(analogRead(0), 0, 255); // reject values bigger than 255

104 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
map(value, fromLow, fromHigh, toLow, toHigh)
Maps a value in the range fromLow and maxLow to the range toLow and
toHigh. Very useful to process values from analogue sensors.

Example:
val = map(analogRead(0),0,1023,100, 200); // maps the value of
// analog 0 to a value
// between 100 and 200

double pow(base, exponent)

Returns the result of raising a number (base) to a value (exponent).

Example:
double x = pow(y, 32); // sets x to y raised to the 32nd power

double sqrt(x)
Returns the square root of a number.

Example:
double a = sqrt(1138); // approximately 33.73425674438

double sin(rad)
Returns the sine of an angle specified in radians.

Example:
double sine = sin(2); // approximately 0.90929737091

double cos(rad)
Returns the cosine of an angle specified in radians.

Example:
double cosine = cos(2); // approximately -0.41614685058

double tan(rad)
Returns the tangent of an angle specified in radians.

Example:
double tangent = tan(2); // approximately -2.18503975868

Appendix C 105

www.it-ebooks.info
Random number functions
If you need to generate random numbers, you can use Arduino’s pseudo-
random number generator.

randomSeed(seed)
Resets Arduino’s pseudorandom number generator. Although the distribu-
tion of the numbers returned by random() is essentially random, the se-
quence is predictable. So, you should reset the generator to some random
value. If you have an unconnected analog pin, it will pick up random noise
from the surrounding environment (radio waves, cosmic rays, electromag-
netic interference from cell phones and fluorescent lights, and so on).

Example:
randomSeed(analogRead(5)); // randomize using noise from pin 5

long random(max)
long random(min, max)
Returns a pseudorandom long integer value between min and max – 1.
If min is not specified, the lower bound is 0.

Example:
long randnum = random(0, 100); // a number between 0 and 99
long randnum = random(11); // a number between 0 and 10

Serial communication
As you saw in Chapter 5, you can communicate with devices over the USB
port using a serial communication protocol. Here are the serial functions.

Serial.begin(speed)
Prepares Arduino to begin sending and receiving serial data. You’ll
generally use 9600 bits per second (bps) with the Arduino IDE serial moni-
tor, but other speeds are available, usually no more than 115,200 bps.

Example:
Serial.begin(9600);

Serial.print(data)
Serial.print(data, encoding)
Sends some data to the serial port. The encoding is optional; if not
supplied, the data is treated as much like plain text as possible.

106 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
Examples:
Serial.print(75); // Prints "75"
Serial.print(75, DEC); // The same as above.
Serial.print(75, HEX); // "4B" (75 in hexadecimal)
Serial.print(75, OCT); // "113" (75 in octal)
Serial.print(75, BIN); // "1001011" (75 in binary)
Serial.print(75, BYTE); // "K" (the raw byte happens to
// be 75 in the ASCII set)

Serial.println(data)
Serial.println(data, encoding)
Same as Serial.print(), except that it adds a carriage return and linefeed
(\r\n) as if you had typed the data and then pressed Return or Enter.

Examples:
Serial.println(75); // Prints "75\r\n"
Serial.println(75, DEC); // The same as above.
Serial.println(75, HEX); // "4B\r\n"
Serial.println(75, OCT); // "113\r\n"
Serial.println(75, BIN); // "1001011\r\n"
Serial.println(75, BYTE); // "K\r\n"

int Serial.available()
Returns how many unread bytes are available on the Serial port for
reading via the read() function. After you have read() everything available,
Serial.available() returns 0 until new data arrives on the serial port.

Example:
int count = Serial.available();

int Serial.read()
Fetches one byte of incoming serial data.

Example:
int data = Serial.read();

Serial.flush()
Because data may arrive through the serial port faster than your program
can process it, Arduino keeps all the incoming data in a buffer. If you need
to clear the buffer and let it fill up with fresh data, use the flush() function.

Example:
Serial.flush();

Appendix C 107

www.it-ebooks.info
Appendix D/Reading
Schematic Diagrams
So far, we have used very detailed illustrations to describe how to assemble
our circuits, but as you can imagine, it’s not exactly a quick task to draw
one of those for any experiment you want to document.

Similar issues arise, sooner or later, in every discipline. In music, after you
write a nice song, you need to write it down using musical notation.

Engineers, being practical people, have developed a quick way to capture

the essence of a circuit in order to be able to document it and later rebuild
it or pass it to somebody else.

In electronics, schematic diagrams allow you to describe your circuit in

a way that is understood by the rest of the community. Individual compo-
nents are represented by symbols that are a sort of abstraction of either
the shape of the component or the essence of them. For example, the
capacitor is made of two metal plates separated by either air or plastic;
therefore, its symbol is:

Another clear example is the inductor, which is built by

winding copper wire around a cylindrical shape; conse-
quently the symbol looks as shown to the left.

The connections between components are usually made

using either wires or tracks on the printed circuit board
and are represented on the diagram as simple lines.
When two wires are connected, the connection is repre-
sented by a big dot placed where the two lines cross, as
shown in the illustration to the left.

108 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info
This is all you need to understand basic schematics. Here is a more
comprehensive list of symbols and their meanings:

RESISTOR CAPACITOR THERMISTOR LDR LIGHT SENSOR

DIODE LED PUSHBUTTON POTENTIOMETER

You may encounter variations in these symbols (for example, both

variants of resistor symbols are shown here). See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Electronic_symbol for a larger list of electronics symbols. By convention,
diagrams are drawn from left to right. For example, a radio would be
drawn starting with the antenna on the left, following the path of the radio
signal as it makes its way to the speaker (which is drawn on the right).

The following schematic describes the push-button circuit shown earlier

in this book:

+5 V

ARDUINO

PIN 7

GND GND

Appendix D 109

www.it-ebooks.info
Index

Symbols [ ] (square brackets), in arrays, 98, 101

-= (subtraction and assignment) opera-
10 kilohm resistors, 41, 62, 81 tor, 102
270 ohm resistors, 56 – (subtraction) operator, 101
+= (addition and assignment) operator,
102 A
+ (addition) operator, 101
&& (and) operator, 101 A (anode), 28
// (comment delimiter), 33, 96 abs( ) function, 104
/* */ (comment delimiters), 96 AC adapter, 18
{ } (curly brackets), 32, 34, 95 accelerometers, 69
in arrays, 98 actuators, 28
around code blocks, 101 amperes, 39
–– (decrement) operator, 102 analogRead( ) function, 62, 103
/= (division and assignment) operator, brightness values, 65
102 analogue
/ (division) operator, 101 input, 62, 71
= (equals sign), assignment operator, output, 71
43, 46 pins, Arduino board, 18
== (equal to) operator, 43, 46, 101 sensor circuit, 63–66
< (greater than) operator, 101 analogWrite( ) function, 56, 103
>= (greater than or equal to) operator, brightness values, 65
101 anode, 28
++ (increment) operator, 102 Arabic numerals, 97
< (less than) operator, 101 Arduino. See also Arduino language
<= (less than or equal to) operator, 101 basic building blocks, 71
% (modulo) operator, 101 collaboration between users, 16
*= (multiplication and assignment) connection to Internet, 73
operator, 102 Diecimila board, 18, 86
* (multiplication) operator, 101 differences from other platforms, 1
!= (not equal to) operator, 101 Duemilanove board, 19
! (not) operator, 101 FAQs on main website, 89
|| (or) operator, 101 hardware, 17–19
( ) (parentheses), 34 installing, 20
following if keyword, 43 major parts, board and IDE, 17
grouping expressions, 101 motor circuit for, 69
# (pound sign), in HTML color codes, 73 NG board, 18, 86
; (semicolon) philosophy, 5, 7, 10
ending lines of code, 95 solderless breadboard, 91
ending statements, 44

www.it-ebooks.info
 testing the board, 86 C
Uno board, 19, 21
Arduino language, 95–108 calculations, 101
Boolean operators, 101 capacitors
comparison operators, 101 reading, 94
compound operators, 101 symbol for, 108
control structures, 98–101 carpet switches, 51
datatypes, 96–98 cathode, 28
input and output functions, 102 character sets, 97
mathematical and trigonometric func- char datatype, 96
tions, 104 circuits
random number functions, 106 analog sensor, 63
serial communication, 106 Arduino networked lamp, 81
special characters, 95 bending, 10
variables, 96 motor circuit for Arduino, 69
Arduino Store, 41 Ohm’s law formula, 40
ArduinoUNO.inf file, 22 one circuit, many behaviors, 43
Arduino Way, 5 push-button, 109
arguments, 34, 35 relationships among voltage, current,
delay( ) function, 35 and resistance, 39
arithmetic and formulas, 101 schematic diagrams of, 108
arrays, 98 C language, 20
ASCII, 97 code
“Aton” lamp, 71 Arduino networked lamp, in Arduino,
avr-gcc compiler, 20 79–81
Arduino networked lamp, in Process-
ing, 74–78
B
blinking LED at rate specified in ana-
blinking LEDs log input, 64
code, blinking LED at rate specified in serial objects, 67
analog input, 64 setting brightness of LED with analog
controlling with PWM, 54 input, 65
blinking LED sketch, 28–32 turning on LED when button is
code, step by step, 34–36 pressed, 45
blocks of code, 32, 34 turning on LED when button is
naming, 33 pressed and keeping it on after,
boolean datatype, 96 47
Boolean operators, 101 turning on LED when button is
pressed, with de-bouncing, 49
bouncing, 48
variables, 43
de-bouncing pushbutton-controlled
LEDs, 49 code blocks, 32
brightness { } (curly braces) around, 101
changing for blinking LEDs, 54 naming, 33
setting for LED with analog input, 65 collaboration among Arduino users, 16
buffers, 74 Colombo, Joe, 71
burglar alarms, infrared sensors, 53 colours, HTML coding, 73
byte datatype, 97 comments, 33, 34, 96
common cathode, 82
comparison operators, 101

Index 111

www.it-ebooks.info
compiler, 20 E
complex sensors, 68
COM port, on Windows, 25 electricity, 37–40
compound operators, 101 Ohm’s law formula, 40
computer keyboards, 13 voltage, 35
constants, 34, 35, 96 external power supply, 18
constrain( ) function, 104 troubleshooting with older Arduinos,
continue statement, 100 86
control structures, 98–101 Extreme board, 86
cos( ) function, 105
current, 39 F
false, 96
D FALSE, 43
datatypes, 96–98 flash memory, 44
debugging, 86. See also troubleshooting float datatype, 97
decimal numbers, 73 fonts, generating for Processing sketch,
delay( ) function, 35, 104 78
changing the time, 54 for statement, 98
delayMicroseconds( ) function, 104 forum, 89
delays rules for, 90
adjusting to eliminate pushbutton functions, 33
bouncing, 48 abs( ), 104
changing amount for different blinking analogRead( ), 62, 103
patterns, 36 analogWrite( ), 56, 103
design, Interaction Design, 2 constrain( ), 104
Device Manager (Windows), 24, 88 cos( ), 105
Diecimila board, 18, 86 delay( ), 35, 104
digital delayMicroseconds( ), 104
input, 71 digitalRead( ), 40, 102
INPUT or OUTPUT mode for pins, 34 digitalWrite( ), 35, 102
output, 71 input and output, 102
pins, 18, 34 loop( ), 35, 95
programmable electronics, advan- map( ), 105
tages of, 43 mathematical and trigonometric, 104
digitalRead( ) function, 40, 102 max( ), 104
storing returned result in a variable, 44 millis( ), 103
digitalWrite( ) function, 35, 102 min( ), 104
diodes pinMode( ), 34, 102
1N4007, 68 pow( ), 105
symbol for, 109 pulseIn( ), 103
divide and rule, 85 random( ), 106
double datatype, 97 randomSeed( ), 106
do . . . while statement, 99 returning results, 42, 100
drivers, installing, 21 serial communication, 106
Duemilanove board, 18 setup( ), 95
Dyson, James, 6 shiftOut( ), 103
sin( ), 105

112 Index

www.it-ebooks.info
 sqrt( ), 105 Interactive Device, 27
tan( ), 105 int variable, 43
time, 103
J
G jumper wire kit, 41
gestural interfaces, 52 junk, using, 14
Ghazala, Reed, 10
K
H K (cathode), 28
hacking Kernighan, Brian W., 88
circuits, 10 keyboards, hacking, 12
junk, 14
keyboards, 12 L
toys, 15 lamps
Haque, Usman, 15 “Aton”, 71
hardware, Arduino, 17–19 IKEA “FADO” table lamp, 82
help, online sources, 89 interactive, 36
hexadecimal numbers, 73 spherical networked lamp, 71–83
HIGH, 35, 40 Latin characters, 97
Hopper, Grace, 86 LDRs (light-dependent resistors), 28, 61
HTML, colours represented in, 73 symbol for, 109
LEDs
I blinking LED sketch, 28–32
IDE (Integrated Development Environ- blinking LED sketch, explanation of
ment), 20 code, 34–37
downloading, 1, 20 connecting to Arduino, 29
Processing’s Tools menu, Create Font, LED constant, 34
78 polarization, 81
Serial Monitor button, 67 pushbutton-controlled, 40–49
troutbleshooting, 88 RGB, 82
verifying code, 31 setting brightness with analog input,
if . . . else statement, 98 65
if statements, 43 symbol for, 109
IKEA “FADO” table lamp, 82 light
inductor, symbol for, 108 controlling and making interactive, 36
infrared rangers, 69 controlling with PWM, 54
infrared sensors, 53 light-dependent resistors. See LDRs
input light emitting diodes. See LEDs
analogue, 62, 71 light sensors, 60–66
digital, 71 Linux
functions for, 102 installing Arduino, 20
INPUT, 34 online help with installing Arduino, 20
input/output (I/O) board, 1 L (LED), 28, 86
int datatype, 97 long datatype, 97
Interaction Design, 2 loop( ) function, 33, 35, 95

Index 113

www.it-ebooks.info
LOW, 35, 40 P
“Low Tech Sensors and Actuators”, 15
passive infrared or PIR sensors, 53
M patching, 8
photoresistor, 28
Macintosh Physical Computing, 3
installing Arduino, 20 Pike, Rob, 88
installing drivers, 21 pinMode( ) function, 34, 102
port identification, 23 pins, Arduino board, 18, 91
magnetic switches, 51 20 milliamps maximum capacity, 68
Make blog, 72 analog, 103
Maker Shed, parts, 41 Analog In, 62
map( ) function, 105 checking if voltage is applied, 40
mathematical and trigonometric func- configuring, 34
tions, 104 configuring digital pins, 102
max( ) function, 104 controlling with analogWrite( ) function,
memory, RAM and flash, 44 54
metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect LED connected to PWM pin, 56
transistor. See MOSFET transistor Playground wiki, 89
microcontrollers, 3 Playground (Wiki), 16
milliseconds, 35 port identification, 23–25
millis( ) function, 103 Windows COM port number, 88
min( ) function, 104 potentiometer, symbol for, 109
momentary tactile pushbutton switch, power selection jumper (PWR_SEL), 18
41
power supplies, 18
Moog, Robert, 8
troubleshooting, 88
MOSFET transistor, 68
pow( ) function, 105
IRF520, 68
Practice of Programming, The, 88
motion detection, passive infrared (PIR)
pre-cut jumper wire kit, 41
sensors, 53
Processing language, 1, 20, 67
advantages of using with Arduino, 73
N sketch, Arduino networked lamp,
NG board, 18, 86 74–78
programming. See also code; sketches
O cycle, 20
if statement, 43
object, defined, 66 prototyping, 6
ohms, 39, 41 pseudorandom number generator, 106
Ohm’s law formula, 40 pulseIn( ) function, 103
on/off sensors, 51–53 punctuation, 97
on/off values (state variable), 45 pushbutton-controlled LEDs, 40–49
opportunistic prototyping, 6 bouncing, 48
output code, 42
analogue, 71 code, turning on LED and keeping it on
digital, 71 after button press, 47
functions for, 102 code, turning on LED when button is
OUTPUT, 34 pressed, 45

114 Index

www.it-ebooks.info
 code, turning on LED when button is Serial.flush( ) function, 107
pressed, with debouncing, 49 Serial Monitor button, 67
parts, 41 serial ports, 32
pushbutton, schematic symbol for, 109 identification on Macintosh, 23
PWM (pulse with modulation), 54 identification on Windows, 24
LED connected to PWM pin, 56 Serial.print( ) function, 106
PWR_SEL, 18 Serial.println( ) function, 107
Serial.read( ) function, 107
R setup( ) function, 33, 95
shiftOut( ) function, 103
RAM, 44
simplification and segmentation pro-
random( ) function, 106
cess, 85, 88
random number functions, 106
sin( ) function, 105
randomSeed( ) number, 106
sketches, 17
reading resistors and capacitors, 93
Arduino networked lamp, in Arduino,
reading schematic diagrams, 108 79
reed relays, 51 Arduino networked lamp, in Process-
resistance, 39 ing, 74–78
resistors, 28 blinking an LED, 28–32
10 kilohm, 41, 62, 81 blinking LED code explanation, 34–37
270 ohm, 56 downloading, 30
light-dependent resistor (LDR), 28, 61 execution of, 32
number of, and current flow, 39 fading an LED in and out, 57
reading, 93 loop( ) function, 33
symbol for, 109 pushbutton-controlled LEDs, 42
return statement, 100 serial objects, 67
reusing existing technology, 7 setup( ) function, 33
RGB LED, 82 structure, 95
R (resistance) = V (voltage) / I (current), trouble with uploading, 86
40 turning on LED when button is
RSS feeds, 73 pressed and keeping it on after
run.bat file, using to launch Arduino, 88 release, 45, 47
RX and TX (LEDs), 32 turning on LED with button press,
keeping it on, and de-bouncing,
S 49
uploading, 31
schematic diagrams, reading, 108 Sniffin’ Glue, 11
sensors, 27 solderless breadboards, 41, 91
complex, 68 Somlai-Fischer, Adam, 15
how they work, 28 special characters, 95
light sensors, 60–66 += (addition and assignment) opera-
on/off, 51–53 tor, 102
on/off vs. analogue, 62 + (addition) operator, 101
Serial.available( ) function, 107 && (and) operator, 101
Serial.begin( ) function, 106 // (comment delimiter), 33, 96
serial communication, 66, 71, 106 /* */, comment delimiters, 96
serial objects, 66 { } (curly brackets), 32, 34, 95, 98

Index 115

www.it-ebooks.info
 special characters (cont.) tilt switches, 52
–– (decrement) operator, 102 time, functions for, 103
/= (division and assignment) operator, tinkering, 5, 7
102 circuit bending, 10
/ (division) operator, 101 reusing existing technology, 7
= (equals sign), assignment operator, toys, hacking, 15
43, 46 transistor, MOSFET, 68
== (equal to) operator, 43, 46, 101 trigonometric functions, 104
< (greater than) operator, 101 troubleshooting, 85–90
>= (greater than or equal to) opera- excluding each component separately
tor, 101 with testing, 85
++ (increment) operator, 102 IDE (Integrated Development Environ-
< (less than) operator, 101 ment), 88
<= (less than or equal to) operator, 101 isolating problems, 88
% (modulo) operator, 101 simplifying and segmenting the
*= (multiplication and assignment) project, 85
operator, 102 testing the board, 86
* (multiplication) operator, 101 understanding how parts work and
!= (not equal to) operator, 101 interact, 85
! (not) operator, 101 using online help sources for Arduino,
|| (or) operator, 101 89
( ) (parentheses), 34, 43, 101 TRUE, 43
# (pound sign), in HTML color codes, true and false, 96
73 TX and RX (LEDs), 32
; (semicolon), 44, 95
[ ] (square brackets), 98, 101 U
-= (subtraction and assignment)
operator, 102 ultrasonic rangers, 69
– (subtraction) operator, 101 UNICODE, 97
sqrt( ) function, 105 Uno board, 18
state variables, 45 unsigned int datatype, 97
strings, 97 Upload to I/O Board button, 31
SV1 jumper connections, 86 USB
switch case statement, 98 Arduino connection, 66
switches, 51 port identification on Windows, 89
momentary tactile pushbutton switch, power supplies, 18
41 programming Arduino over, 1
MOSFET transistors, 68 troubleshooting Arduino connection,
tilt, 52 86
synthesizers users’ groups, 16
circuit bending with, 10
Moog analog synthesizers, 8 V
variables, 43, 96
T datatypes, 96–98
tan( ) function, 105 state, 45
thermistor, symbol for, 109 Vista (Windows)
thermostats, 51 port identification, 24

116 Index

www.it-ebooks.info
 troubleshooting port identification, 88
“visual programming” environments, 8
voltage, 35
applied to pin, checking with analog
Read( ), 62
applied to pin, checking with digital-
Read( ) function, 40
defined, 39
readings, 18
relationship to current, 39

W
while statement, 99
Wiki, “Playground”, 16
Windows
COM port number for Arduino, 88
installing Arduino, 20
installing drivers, 21
port identification, 24

X
XML file from RSS feed, 73
XP (Windows)
installing drivers, 21
port identification, 24
troubleshooting port identification, 88

Index 117

www.it-ebooks.info
 save 15% with coupon code ARDINTRO
offer expires at midnight on 12/31/2011

Ultimate Microcontroller Pack ARDUINO UNO

The Ultimate Microcontroller Pack includes everything you need to dive Arduino is a tool for making com-
right into the world of microcontrollers. The 100+ components allow you puters that can sense and control
to complete nearly any online tutorial without having to source individual more of the physical world than
parts. Everyone from beginners to advanced users will appreciate all that your desktop computer!
the Ultimate Microcontroller Pack has to offer.

MakerSHIELD KIT Mintronics: Survival Pack

The ultimate open source proto- You never know when you'll find yourself in a MacGyver moment. It can
typing shield for Arduino & com- happen anywhere, at any time. Wouldn't it be easier to hack those elec-
patible microcontrollers. Create tronics with some real components instead of a rubber band and a paper
your circuits the way you want, clip? The Mintronics: Survival Pack from the Maker Shed contains over
and easily make changes without 60 useful components for making, hacking, and modifying electronic
having to solder. circuits and repairs on the go.

Discover DIY kits, tools, books, and more at makershed.com

118 Getting Started with Arduino

www.it-ebooks.info