Sunday, April 11, 2010

Getting started with Arduino review


Author: Massimo Banzi
Publish date: Oct. 2008
First edition

This book gives you information about the way of Arduino or Arduino philosophy, this way starts when Mr. Benzie was teaching students and designers the basics of electronics, in other words he wanted to taught electronics to non-professionals. Mr. Benzie goes back to his earlier times when he learned electronics by work by practice not by theory; he realized that classes these days focus on theory more than practice. So in this book he clarifies the principles that should be followed in Arduino way and in tinkering for example, the author stated that "we love junk" (old electronic devices) we should play with those old devices and hack them to get new ideas such as keyboards we can disassemble them to get the small chip inside and try to hack it and make our input device to computer, after we make our device we can link it to any sensor and to computer.

After clarifying Arduino way, there is a very good description about Arduino platform (the hardware and the software), the Arduino board (hardware) is a microcontroller (small computer), that receives instructions from Arduino IDE (software) and save inside it to apply the instructions always. These instructions will be converts to acts by Arduino I/O (In & Out) pins; the book has many examples about the inputs and outputs such as digital inputs & outputs, analog inputs & outputs. Finally there are examples about Arduino-Computer communications (serial communications).

In addition, there are many books mentioned in the book, Mr. Benzie recommend Tom Igoe’s “Making Things Talk” for learning about complex sensors also recommend “Low-tech Sensors and Actuators” by Adan Somali-Fischer & Usman Haque for learning about hacking low price toys.

In conclusion, we can say that the book focus on Arduino knowledge and the tinkering, hacking philosophy, on the information (how to use and get befits of Arduino) and the inspiration (how to understand and apply your ideas on technology).

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Drawing Arduino in Google SketchUp 7

I tried to find Arduino Duemilanove in  3D Warehouse but did not find it, I found a model for Diecimila, I tried to make it by my self this is the result, it is not very good but maybe I will update it later.


I tried to upload it to 3D Warehouse but they only accept kmz files for Google Earth, 


Update: I knew now that I should upload it from inside SketchUp. Here is the download URL:
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=65ebac1e83702f15bf5a7d4d00dbf624

This is a picture of it:


Best Regards

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Say welcome to books

Today I received three electronic books I had bought earlier from Amazon, the books are:
Getting Started with Arduino.
MAKE: Electronics: Learning by Discovery.
Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics, Fourth Edition.

This is my first impression of the books:

I had read a digital version of the first one (Getting Started with Arduino) but I like to read the paper book, it is very good for any one who wants to learn about Arduino and has many good and resourceful information in a friendly manner.




The second book (MAKE: Electronics: Learning by Discovery), is published by O'Reilly media and it is very good for electronics newbie, because it taught you by discovering not as the academic way, for example in many places in the book the author will ask you to do something in a wrong way to taught you how electricity works or to till you why we do this not that. I got this book because it is highly recommended by Make community and many DIY people, it is ranking No. #1  in Amazon Electrical & Electronics, in Robotics and in Robotics & Automation books.


The third one (Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics, Fourth Edition), this one second bestseller in Electrical & Electronics books in Amazon, I like this book because it Combines electricity and electronics.

I will study these books and post my notes here. Thanks you everyone.