Me and a friend is building a robot, our first step will be to be able to directly control it. I've created the basic circuit which will control the motor and is ready to hook the circuit up to the arduino to test it. I'm using a led and much lover voltage in place of the motor at the moment, one advantage with this is that its dual colored so I can also test the reverse part of the circuit.
From what I understand the arduino works by that you upload your program on it and then it executes it but I want to be hoked up and have it monitor for keyboard input beforehand and I'm not treally sure how to do it.
Can the arduino natively communicate with the laptop or will I have to create a secondary program running on the laptop which sends the information to a port or something which the ardino then monitors?