The world has been waiting for a really good book
on how to get started with Arduino. There's some excellent
introductions, great
training manuals, but a nice reference with projects has
still been in the void. Practical Arduino - Cool Projects for
Open Source Hardware is a pretty darn good attempt at filling
this void. We're looking at 13 packed projects across 16 chapters and
420+ pages of content.
Instead of just having simple chapter projects like "How to connect an
LCD to your Arduino", these projects embed these tasks as part of a
much more useful larger project. Here's what projects the
authors Jonathan Oxer and Hugh Blemings bring to you in this tome:
- Appliance remote control
- Time-lapse camera controller
- Virtual USB keyboard
- PS/2 keyboard or mouse input
- Security / automation sensors
- Online thermometer
- Touch control panel
- Speech synthesizer
- Water flow gauge
- Oscilloscope/logic analyzer
- Water tank depth sensor
- Weather station receiver
- RFID access control system
- Vehicle telemetry platform
We haven't finished going through the whole book yet, but we can tell
you that it does include a tidy introduction to electronics, the basics
of reading schematics, and a section on resources which is more like a
cookbook of useful modular circuits that make using Arduino even easier.
The sketch code snippets are not listed fully in
the book (you download the full project
sketches from the support
website), but what is even more useful is that the code
listed is commented far more in depth than you would usually find in a
sketch by itself. Long descriptive sentences break up code listings to
offer additional detail regarding what is going on at that
point.
There are some niggly points that do detract from
the book. As a first edition, there's bound to be some mistakes, but
the only ones we've located so far involve the quality of the
production. Many of the pictures are muddy and gray, so picking out
details can be a little tough. There's a few printing errors (pg 66 has
a double-print of an illustration). We understand the rush to get this
to market, so first-edition problems are bound to happen. These minor
issues are definitely forgivable given the vast usefulness of the
written content.
Here is some of the official press-release information regarding the
book:
What you'll learn
- Communication with serial devices including RFID readers,
temperature sensors, and GPS modules
- Connecting Arduino to Ethernet and WiFi networks
- Adding synthesized speech to Arduino
- Linking Arduino to web services
- Decoding data streams from commercial wireless devices
- How to make DIY prototyping shields for only a couple of
dollars
Who is this book for?
This book is for hobbyists and developers interested in physical
computing using a low-cost, easy-to-learn platform
About the Author
Jonathan
Oxer, who has been labeled "Australia's Geekiest Man," has been hacking
on both hardware and software since he was a little tacker. He is a
former president of Linux Australia, and founder and technical director
of Internet Vision Technologies. He is author of a number of books
including How to Build a Website and Stay Sane, Ubuntu
Hacks, and Quickstart Guide to Google AdWords.
He has been surgically implanted with an RFID chip and is set to host
an upcoming TV show called SuperHouse
(www.superhouse.tv) featuring high-tech home renovation, open source
automation systems, and domestic hardware hacking. Jonathan has
appeared on top-rating TV shows and been interviewed on dozens of radio
stations about his home automation system. He was technical supervisor
for the first season of the reality TV show The Phone,
has
connected his car to the Internet (www.geekmyride.org), and is also a
member of the core team of Lunar Numbat (www.lunarnumbat.org), an
Australian group working with the European team White Label Space
(www.whitelabelspace.com) on an unmanned moon mission for the Google
Lunar X-Prize (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Oxer).
Hugh
took a radio apart when he was about eight and never recovered. From
this start and an interest in Ham Radio an early career doing hardware
and embedded software development followed back when 68HC11's were the
latest and greatest. Hugh has been working on Free software
since the mid-90's for fun and as a (still fun!) paid gig since 1999.
He was co-author of the gnokii project and developed kernel device
drivers for the Keyspan USB-serial adaptors. He worked at IBM's Linux
Technology Centre as a Open Source Hacker in the Canberra based OzLabs
team for just shy of eight years doing everything from first line
management to Linux kernel porting for embedded PowerPC platforms. He
now works on Ubuntu Linux at Canonical in the kernel team but remains
firmly of the view that any day that involves a soldering iron, a
'scope and emacs is a good day.
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