Arduino and its derivatives are a powerful suite of creative tools for your microcontroller projects.
However, you MUST LEARN the various ‘languages’ required to develop and get help with your projects.
The basics -
Basic electrical theory
C/C++
Reading
Pencil and paper
Basic Documentation
It’s like stepping up through
Wooden blocks,
Duplo
Lego
and onwards from there
Don’t t be discouraged if you really want to learn and grow.
In Uncategorized? Good thing you're a newb!
This first post seems to be an answer to an unasked question?
What is going on here?
Something for newbies, and Christmas Arduino beginners.
It can be moved.
Tom.... 
You can move it yourself. Open topic, big pencil next to title.
That explains why I failed so miserably with the Meccano set that Santa brought me as a wee lad. I may have had the wooden blocks before, but the Duplo and Lego steps were skipped.
I did eventually figure it out, but not until many, many years later!
Hi,
I skipped the Lego, my father had Mecanno as a boy, so he made sure his son did likewise.
Started with set 0, then 1A to upgrade the set , then 2a etc etc, finally got to where I could build the big cranes and the spirograph.
Tom....
PS. Also helped if your dad was a toystore manager.....
Meccano for me too, and none of that "here is a kit to build a specific machine" nonsense, complete with specially shaped/coloured components for that machine. Just a box of standard bits and your own imagination along with some suggested projects to build using the standard bits.
In my timeline Lego did not exist when I was young and I only came to Lego as an adult, mostly Lego Technic, complete with its own microcontroller and programming language
I understand why they did it, but for me Lego went downhill when they started selling kits to build specific models.
Meccano was ‘user programmable’ hardware.’
The significant difference is that it was physical & absolute…. nothing virtual or relative !
it didn’t require learning about dependencies other than the floor.
A loose bolt might create a runtime error.
A compile error was ‘if the part didn’t fit’
And if done properly, it was both object-oriented and functional.
(This is the one that six year old me simply could not figure out - but I did eventually.)
Ah. Didn't know Meccano. I had an old Erector Set.
Same concept, just nuts and bolts stuff...
Yeah, apparently Meccano bought Erector in 1990
The problem with this is that "C/C++" is a HUGE pile of "stuff", and you certainly don't need to learn all of it to do a lot of useful things. That would be like saying you you need to be able to drive a racecar in order to be able to ride a bicycle.
It's a particular problem with "embedded", "physical", or microcontroller computing, since many of the beginning classes and tutorials in C or C++ go in directions that are not very applicable to those environments.
Very true. I specifically included C++ because it’s the ‘home language’ for the popular IDE, I added C because it’s about 90% of what you need to effectively use an ‘Arduino’ out of the box, and the huge number of canned libraries make many projects a half-hour session.
Neither of them (C / C+=) are very user friendly, but a lot better to begin with than machine code / assembler.
Any interpreter is easier to learn with, but gives away a lot of performance and memory just to support the language itself. That’s why BASIC was so popular in the early days.
I remember ‘back in the day’, some of my good friends loved FORTH for its simplicity and purity, but it’s a LOT of work to implement any serious, large project.
Horses for courses !
I always felt ‘dirty’ if I had to curve or ’cheat’ making parts fit together !
Likewise, wasn't happy with bending panels, until they switched to the flexible plastic panels.
Tom....
Plastic Meccano ?
Just say NO !
