Arduino Challenge

What is Arduino?

From the Arduino website:

Arduino is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer. It's an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board.

Arduino can be used to develop interactive objects, taking inputs from a variety of switches or sensors, and controlling a variety of lights, motors, and other physical outputs. Arduino projects can be stand-alone, or they can be communicate with software running on your computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP.) The boards can be assembled by hand or purchased preassembled; the open-source IDE can be downloaded for free.

The Arduino programming language is an implementation of Wiring, a similar physical computing platform, which is based on the Processing multimedia programming environment.

Basically, Arduino is a microprocessor that was intended to be used by artist and people with no technical background and was designed to be extremely simply to program and connect to a whole host of sensors so that it can gather information about the work around it and actuators so that it can affect that world.

The goal of this challenge is to learn to use the Arduino and some of it's myriad attachments.

Rules:

Being that I don't know much about the gritty details of working with Arduino the rules for this challenge are going to be a little free form. There are basically three stages of each project:

1. Designing
2. Building
3. Programming

Depending on what I am working on the steps may or may not be in that orders and some steps may repeat if I have done something wrong! Designing will require some amount of research depending on what I am trying to connect to the Arduino and drawing out how it's all going to fit together. Building will be the actual construction of the circuit and hardware. Programming is writing the code to make it all go. This may not be only Arduino code, but it will all be pertinent to the project. The loose rules that I will go by will be to perform at least one full step in a project per day. In the beginning it is likely to be more than one step since I am going to start out with very simple projects and tutorials to learn from but then, as I move on to more complex examples each step may take more time. There are two hard rules that I will comply with:

1. I will take a picture of the progress at the end of each day and post it to this blog.
2. I will post an update each week describing what has transpired during the week. Fridays haven't really worked out all that well for me so I am switching to Mondays.