Third, extended and revised edition with AVR Playground and Elektor Uno R4

Arduino boards have become hugely successful. They are simple to use and inexpensive. This book will not only familiarize you with the world of Arduino but it will also teach you how to program microcontrollers in general. In this book theory is put into practice on an Arduino board using the Arduino programming environment.

Some hardware is developed too: a multi-purpose shield to build some of the experiments from the first 10 chapters on; the AVR Playground, a real Arduino-based microcontroller development board for comfortable application development, and the Elektor Uno R4, an Arduino Uno R3 on steroids.

The author, an Elektor Expert, provides the reader with the basic theoretical knowledge necessary to program any microcontroller: inputs and outputs (analog and digital), interrupts, communication busses (RS-232, SPI, I²C, 1-wire, SMBus, etc.), timers, and much more. The programs and sketches presented in the book show how to use various common electronic components: matrix keyboards, displays (LED, alphanumeric and graphic color LCD), motors, sensors (temperature, pressure, humidity, sound, light, and infrared), rotary encoders, piezo buzzers, pushbuttons, relays, etc. This book will be your first book about microcontrollers with a happy ending!

This book is for you if you are a beginner in microcontrollers, an Arduino user (hobbyist, tinkerer, artist, etc.) wishing to deepen your knowledge,an Electronics Graduate under Undergraduate student or a teacher looking for ideas.

Thanks to Arduino the implementation of the presented concepts is simple and fun. Some of the proposed projects are very original:

Money Game
Misophone (a musical fork)
Car GPS Scrambler
Weather Station
DCF77 Decoder
Illegal Time Transmitter
Infrared Remote Manipulator
Annoying Sound Generator
Italian Horn Alarm
Overheating Detector
PID Controller
Data Logger
SVG File Oscilloscope
6-Channel Voltmeter

All projects and code examples in this book have been tried and tested on an Arduino Uno board. They should also work with the Arduino Mega and every other compatible board that exposes the Arduino shield extension connectors.

Please note

For this book, the author has designed a versatile printed circuit board that can be stacked on an Arduino board. The assembly can be used not only to try out many of the projects presented in this book but also allows for new exercises that in turn provide the opportunity to discover new techniques. Also available is a kit of parts including the PCB and all components. With this kit you can build most of the circuits described in the book and more.

Datasheets Active Components Used (.PDF file):

About the author

Clemens Valens, born in the Netherlands, lives in France since 1997. Manager at Elektor Labs and Webmaster of ElektorLabs, in love with electronics, he develops microcontroller systems for fun, and sometimes for his employer too. Polyglot—he is fluent in C, C++, PASCAL, BASIC and several assembler dialects—Clemens spends most of his time on his computer while his wife, their two children and two cats try to attract his attention (only the cats succeed). Visit the author’s website: www.polyvalens.com.

Authentic testimony of Hervé M., one of the first readers of the book:
'I almost cried with joy when this book made me understand things in only three sentences that seemed previously completely impenetrable.'