Discovering Arduino and Microcontroller Programming

Hello all!

I am David Thompson, a Java Developer from Spain currently living in London who loves playing and researching with technology. I will be writing as often as possible to show you the latest gadgets, ideas or trending technology we are dealing with at our office.

To start out I’ll tell you about how we discovered Arduino and its potential.

We recently had a project that needed a phone to communicate with external hardware. Since it was something totally customized we could not just grab the first device on the market and make it work – we needed something a little more flexible.

The challenge seemed very complex to begin with but after a little investigation we came up with a possible solution: Why not try Arduino?

What is Arduino, you may be thinking?

“Arduino is an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment”.

Don’t panic with the definition, it is as simple as a mini computer that makes use of motors, LEDs or any kind of electronic device accessible, and the best thing is we have total control over them. It is also relatively cheap!

It’s a great platform to begin with Robotics, all you need to do is blow the dust off your electronics 101 book, have really basic understanding of C coding and you are ready to go.

Where to start with Arduino?

If you want some information on where to start I would recommend reading the Arduino Home Page. You can also find some nice tutorials at the main site.

There is loads of information for beginners and advanced users.  The community is also very active and you can ask all sort of questions.

It might be a good idea to buy a starters kit to begin with. It gives you many components to play with, you also won’t need to worry about what and where to buy the extra stuff to start out.

Once you gain knowledge you can buy more specific components, and who knows, you might end up achieving something amazing!

What can you do with Arduino?

Here are some examples of brilliant Arduino ideas, they go from simple colorful lamps up to a 3D printer!

Impressive isn’t it?

As we can see Arduino is a simple way to get us into robotics. But it is also much more than that.

Today almost everyone carries a computer with them all the time. Our smartphone is not only made to make calls or look at our Facebook page, it can also interact with external devices. And what better way than Arduino to build our own personalized gadget which we can control with our Smartphone?

I bet we will see more and more gadgets that interact with our phones over the next few years. If you are a small company or just someone who likes to explore new uses of technology you might want to give it a go.

Who said work had to be boring? 🙂

We will show some of our Arduino work on future posts, so stay tuned!