ARDUINO Beginner to Advanced: Employing Arduino with Proper Understanding

Though, there are many titles available for learning Arduino from programming perspective mainly, but it is highly imperative to consider various hardware, code management, solution architecture and other programming concepts for being successful at designing medium to large scale solutions. Arduino itself, has made programming different microcontrollers, and evaluating designs quite easy; additionally, understanding the hardware, programming fundamentals and code architecture are key areas for building stable and extensible solutions utilizing fundamental building blocks already provided by the software development kit.

Hence, this book is aimed at acting as a starting point for beginners, hobbyists, and junior designers – guiding towards designing various hardware projects utilizing Arduino, while also guiding through to handling projects with varying difficulties involving various multiple elements. Afterall, today’s microcontrollers are much more powerful and capable than most personal computers used during the nineties, though project complexities in real-world scenarios have also grown in and beyond equivalent proportions. Still, it requires quite an undertaking to utilize all the computing and hardware resources in the majority of modern microcontrollers at full capacity.

Although, selection of microcontrollers must be totally based on requirements of target utility; mostly, modern applications are not just about handling one or two tasks with controllers. Often in real-world applications surplus computing and hardware resources are kept in designs for future expansions without incurring massive hardware changes. Therefore, in almost all the modern applications, expansion with system stability remains a constant concern. Without designing applications with extensibility in mind, stability concerns are almost always there to be dealt with – sometimes through a painful process and debugging. Management of fragility in designs is an ongoing concern that needs consideration early for all the systems that are expected to grow over time. Due to inherent ease of prototyping with Arduino, many a times best development practices are rarely seen especially amongst new designers. These do not cause difficulties during initial phases but become evident as systems grow in complexity.

Efforts are made to keep this book concise and to the point; whereby, initially, general programming concepts from C++ are discussed especially those which readers are most likely to use and encounter in hardware programming. Thereafter, Arduino development and hardware concepts are discussed, along with Arduino general libraries; including design best practices and further resources.