Inside the box: Everything I did with an Arduino starter kit

Are there any particular simulators you would recommend?

> but it turns out power requirements vary depending on wavelength of light being generated.

[pedantic]

It's actually because of the different forward voltages of the blue LED vs red, not the overall power

[/pedantic]

Clearly, I knew what you were getting at, but I made that comment because it's useful to understand that LEDs are primarily current controlled devices, not voltage controlled. Had you driven both LEDs with e.g., a 10mA constant-current driver, they would both be solidly visible.

For a regular indicator LED, this isn't really an issue (other than a too-low voltage will cause the flickering you observed), but for high-power illumination LEDs, or especially laser diodes, current management can be the difference between reliable operation or letting the smoke get out.

I have three within my range of vision if I lean a bit and look into another room, and only one gets used. And that's because I compile audio plugins to release VST2 on the Pi as a platform (compiling on a Pi 400) relying on Reaper as a host DAW.

I'm not doing audio work on the Pi, though, just supporting the platform for those (?) who do (?).

I would love to come up with cool things to do with Arduinos etc: I hacked high sample rate support into Eurorack modules that ran on Teensy, and then the Teensy that had the raw audio output pin which supported this use, hit end of life so those modules cannot be replaced now, and what I have is all I'll ever have.

The world of tiny computers is lovely but doesn't always stay accessible. For instance, I never got into hardware synth making that much, but these days all the oscillator chips etc. you'd want to hack with require robotic installation: they're too tiny for someone who grew up on DIP.

Some sort of class helps here a lot - not as much as actual tutoring, but just as motivation and audience that you can show off your projects to.

A tea-making robot you made at your home is boring. A tea-making robot you made during class which participated in end-of-class competition and got 3rd place? Much more interesting.

And if you are in CA, there is Robogames which has (or at least had in the past) categories such as "art bot" (any Arduino project which has a moving part can participate) and even "static bot" (for projects without moving parts). You get to demo your project to few hundred participants, and maybe even get a prize!

>very little you can learn

This very much depends on your initial skill level. Have you ever held a resistor? Do you know which side of the LED is the minus? How many terminals does a hobby servo have and what do they connect to? These are the sorts of questions the kits are meant to answer. You're not really learning "an arduino", you're learning a new tool to make the projects you actually want to make. To "use all the parts" isn't what I usually want out of something.

The kits themselves usually carry too wide of a selection of components to have enough of any one part for a good project anyway, but if you need more, go on Amazon and search for "<insert component> arduino" and buy them by the 10 pack.

If you decide it's not for you, then the kits were always a collection of cheap parts to begin with; not a big loss.

This is actually a very sad comment to read. My childhood was spent buying up every Forrest Mims circuit book I could find at my local Radio Shack, and then trying to figure out which circuits I could bring to life given a very limited amount of components I could source.

I'm not sure what it would take to make these kits more exciting, because I find them ABSOLUTELY AMAZING.

I could rattle off 100 cool projects to make with these dev kits, especially coupled with a 3d printer.

I suspect this is very subjective. I had a Radio Shack 200-in-1 kit when I was a kid and learned tons from it, working through the book and then designing my own projects.

My current project just ties in my doorbell to Home Assistant. I could have built it only using what came with my old Raspberry Pi kit. Once I finish that, I'll be tying in my garage door, another project that uses simple parts. These projects are way simpler than what I do for work (currently writing PLC code for the Navy), but they're still fun.

Me too, I just brought one on Monday :D

https://github.com/hyperion-project/hyperion.ng For a DIY version of Philips Ambilight is a really cool implementation of addressable LEDs.

The Wled project is another amazing implementation. It allows the creation of all sorts of light fixtures, there’s some insane setups on YouTube.

There is no one way to learn electronics. The Arduino will hold your hand through lighting up an LED, but depending on how much depth you want, may not teach you how it's happening. Working with an Arduino is like bowling with bumpers, which is a good place to start.

You could probably spend less and learn more about electronics by buying a few key components like a transistor, a LED, a 9v battery, a switch, a few resistors, a few capacitors and some insulated wire. You don't even need a breadboard--you can tape or clip things together just to see what's happening. There are tons of simple circuits and tutorials for just these components.

I don't think there is much value in the arduino hardware and the value of the arduino software is mainly in it being a standard SDK that works across a wide range of microcontrollers.

The majority of arduino hardware, software and community development is now outside the "official" Arduino project. We definitely owe them a debt of gratitude, but the framework has moved on.

Every major microcontroller vendor now has development boards that have the standard Arduino Uno pinout so you can add cheap "shields" for prototyping. There are entire companies like M5Stack, SeeedStudio and LilyGo whose business model is providing high-integration platforms (CPU, touchscreen, I/O and sometimes an enclosure) that use the arduino framework but run on 32-bit chips instead. And so on.

These days, when you say "arduino" you're almost always referring to a framework and a hardware abstraction layer, instead of the Arduino company itself (sorry, mbanzi).

Teaching academically-correct C++ is not one of Arduino's goals. C++ just happens to be one of the tools in the box.

EE's complain that Arduino doesn't teach correct electronic circuit design principles. Which is also not one of its goals.

The point of Arduino is to learn how--with nothing but a cheap microcontroller and some wires--to make lights blink, sensors sense, and servos serve. It's a starting point for easy and cheap experimentation, not a well-structured curriculum.

I think it's actually a fantastic intro to electronics. There's nothing you can really do with "just arduino programming", the whole point is it lets you interface with the real world and therefor encounter electronics problems by default

The article even touches on that in the first hello world

> This simple exercise it by itself incredibly interesting that opened a series of questions:

> Q: Why is a resistor needed? A: High current and increased temperature damage its delicate heterojunction structures, which eventually cause it to burnout > Q: What happens if the polarity is inverted? A: Similar to a normal diode, current will not flow and the LED will not light up. As long as this reverse power is not high, the LED will not burn and can still be used with correct polarity afterwards > Q: How to interpret its data sheet? A: There are several interesting aspects its datasheet, like the LED’s wavelength curve, operating current and voltage, etc

It's not really electronics in the same way that learning to hold a pencil isn't really calligraphy.