Circuit Bending

Getting started with

arduino

Written by Massimo Banzi.

With materials written by Massimo Banzi, Erica Calogero,

David Cuartielles, Jeff Gray, Tom Igoe, David Mellis and Cristian Nold.

Illustrations by Elisa Canducci.

BETA Version

Index

Introduction 4

/ what is interaction design ? 5

/ what is physical computing ? 5

the arduino way 7

/ tinkering 8

/ patching 9

/ circuit bending 10

/ keyboard hacks 11

/ we love junk 12

/ hacking toys 13

/ collaboration 14

/ the arduino hardware 15

/ the software (IDE) 16

really getting started... 19

/ the interactice device 19

/ sensors and actuators 19

/ basic introduction to programming 20

/ blinking an LED 23

/ what is electricity ? 25

/ the breadboard 28

/ reading a push button 30

/ trying out different on~off sensors 32

/ use the light sensor instead of the pushbutton 33

/ analogue inputs 34

/ try dufferent resistive sensors 36

/ serial communication 37

/ analogue inputs (PWM) 39

/ driving bigger loads (motors, lams, etc…) 40

/ complex sensors 42

/ talking to software 43

Arduino is an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple i/o board and a development environment that implements the Processing language. Arduino can be used to develop stand-alone interactive objects or can be connected to software on your computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, Max/MSP). The boards can be assembled by hand or purchased preassembled; the open-source IDE can be downloaded for free.

Arduino is different from other platforms that can be found on the market because

of these features:

The Arduino Project was developed out of an educational environment and is therefore great for newcomers to get things working quickly.

It is a Multi Platform environment; it can run on Windows, Macintosh and Linux.

It is Based on the Processing programming IDE

It is programmed via a USB cable not a serial port. This is useful because many modern computers don’t have serial ports anymore.

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.

The hardware is cheap. The USB board cost about EUR 20 and replacing a burnt out chip on the board is easy and costs no more than EUR 5. So you can afford to make mistakes.

There is an active community of users so there is plenty of people who can help you.

What does this all mean? We’re going to discover it this through this booklet that is designed to help designers and artistis to understand what benefits they can get from learning how to use the Arduino platform and adopting its philosophy.

/ the software (IDE)

The last component of Arduino is the software. This is a special program running on your computer that allows you to write programs for the Arduino board in a simple language modelled after the Processing language. The magic happens when you press the button that uploads the program to the board: the code you have written is translated into C language, that is normally quite hard to use for a beginner, and passed on to the avr-gcc compiler, an important piece of open-source software that makes the ultimate translation into the language understood by the microcontroller. This last step is quite important because it’s where Arduino is making your life simple and hiding away as much as possible of the complexities of programming microcontrollers.

Downloading and installing the software

In order to program the Arduino board you need to download the development

...