Learn Arduino!

= Learn Arduino! =

Twelve community members and four collaborators joined forces on Saturday, March 26 to get introduced to and play with Arduino. Folks self-organized into groups of two-three and made sensors, programmed morse code and generally learned by doing.

Arduino
Arduino is an open hardware prototyping platform that can be programmed to create interactive objects or components. It's relatively cheap and easy to learn. It comes with a host of resources that help people learn how to use the platform and use it for their own projects.

Here are a few resources you can use to start using Arduino:


 * Website
 * Software Download
 * Arduino Programming Language
 * Libraries

Workshop Activities
Alexander Honkala provided the space for the workshop at All Hands Active, a “maker space” that provides a place and resource for people to get together and work on projects. He also provided mentorship and an introduction to the hardware components of Arduino. All Hands Active hosts Sunday Morning Arduino Time on Sundays for people who want to continue to get experience with Arduino in a collaborative space.

Nate Oostendorp, founder of Ingenuitas, an open source manufacturing company that develops low-budget manufacturing solutions generously provided Arduino kits and hardware for people to work on different types of projects as an introduction to Arduino. He also provided an overview of the software and programming needs to begin using Arduino and provided mentorship to participants. Ingenuitas is currently working on a project to get functional machine vision for ~$1000 – said would normally cost $30k - $50k on the low end with most manufacturing equipment today

Emily Puckett Rodgers gave an introduction to Open.Michigan and Greg Grossmeier provided an overview of the Copyright Office and its activities and mission.

Projects
Participants used laptops to install Arduino (on Macs, PCs and Ubuntu!) and worked in small groups to work on projects that grew progressively more complex. Photos of the workshop can be found on Open.Michigan's flickr page.

Here are some examples of the projects we worked on:


 * Blink program (which is like “Hello World” program for Arduino that includes setup{}, loop{} . Arduino helps out with libraries and shields for dealing with more complex operations).
 * A button hooked up to an LED
 * Potentiometer hooked up to an LED to control the blink rate
 * Light sensor
 * Programming a LED to blink out “Hello World” in Morse code
 * Maker Shed 2010 pins by doing a little soldering (not Arduino based, but still fun!)