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Comment by cwkoss | Hacker News Reader

I got an arduino kit sitting on my shelf I've been meaning to try. Does anyone have a recommendation of a good set of tutorials for beginner projects with arduino?

Competent medium programmer, looking to add lights, motion, sensors to 3D prints eventually.

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The hard part with Arduino is not finding a tutorial, the hard part is deciding what you want to do with it so that you can collect all the right parts and then start programming.

For me, I learnt a lot of ideas from the MIT e-vent arduino repository. I’d say it’s a nice mature arduino project that’s not too large to grok. Ex. Abstraction of sensors into classes that have a setup, read, shutdown methods. Keeping timing state within the sensors etc. It really changed the way I was coding against arduino

https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/HomePage

I recently started arduino programming as well. What is weird is it’s basically the opposite of most software best practices.

You need to use global variables, not use heap allocations, avoid stl library classes, avoid strings, etc. The constraints due to the minimal resources mean you need to throw out elegant and robust programming in order to perform well. So the code ends up looking super hacky.

In embedded and machine control robustness is in simplicity. It is ok to repeat your self.

PLCs until recently only had global variables and a great deal has been accomplished with them.

A lot of machine controls and embedded work is more waterfally and less agile. Figure out what it has to do, make it do that, then it is done and you hand the machine or plant over to the customer and you can’t change it.

Most Arduino code I've seen at the hackerspace I used to go to barely had anything defined as functions. Just setup and loop. There were people who coded for many years and did very cool stuff and they didn't know what a struct was.

Calling code like that super hacky seems a bit weird to me. That's basically all I'd like to say, but to expand a bit (and possibly I'm missing your point somehow), in my opinion, "best practices" in software aren't "best practices" just because, but for reasons that may or may not apply in a specific situation. If they don't apply, then best practice dictates that they are no longer best practices.

That said, I'm not sure what I'd consider to be hacky code in a constrained environment. Looking at https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/3cd0x4/wh..., for example, many things people feel are hacky don't apply to Arduino programming mainly because there is hardly anything external to interface with.

In addition to all the tutorials on the arduino site, Adafruit has a lot of tutorials about using their specific parts. Even if you don't have their specific parts, their tutorials (and libraries) can be useful if you have similar parts or parts based on the same chips.

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