3 months ago i bought an arduino starter kit.
i had a lot of fun doing the 15 projects in the guide. The electronic part was easy for me i have some experience with electronics but i feel like i don't know how to program yet.
i know the basics the guide told me. i feel like i cant learn more from the guide. after some brain storming i made 4x4x4 LED cube but haven't been able to make cool animations with my own program.(i used a code from the internet and it works. )
money is tight because i'm a broke student.(Mechatronics first year. i want to work with robotics) i opened some old CD drives to get some parts for future projects. i want to make a mini cnc but i need stepper motor drives for that. i want to buy a 3d printer next summer. so i can start design my own simple robots. currently i want to display a 'game menu' on a 16x2 LCD that i can control with 3 buttons. one to confirm and 2 to move left or right.
i know that 3 months is a short period of time. i have a lot to learn. i cant understand complex code yet. the led cube is one way to learn the language but what are some projects i can do with the starter kit. to advance my coding? preferably something i can keep on my breadboard. so i can easy disassemble it and try something else.
You could go through the example sketches in the arduino IDE and change them a little to understand what they do. The examples cover a lot of the arduino language.
I'm new to this too, although I've been poking around with electronics for a long time (I built add-on cards such as an EPROM programmer and Rom-Board for my home computers in the early 1980s), and I've been programming in Basic since then, MS VB since the mid '90s.
This is my first experience with 'C' type programming so there's a lot to learn.
My method for learning anything is to serach the net and read items, copy the URL to an MS Word document and then copy the article, save it to a folder named 'basics' so I can review it when I need to refresh my memory.
I copy existing code from the forum that others have written and play around modifying it to make it do different things, that's how I learn.
You mention a CNC machine and needing 'cheap' motors. Our local auction room has PC printers every week and they only sell for two pounds (Sterling), or I could scrounge a couple from our local town 'dump' just by asking the guys there. Do you have anything similar where you are? A lot of PC printers now have a built in scanner, would these have a couple of motors and belts that you could use?
Personally, I find it very difficult to learn from the toy examples in the textbooks and tutorials. I don't learn from organizing a linked list of 3 book titles.
I prefer to have a real problem and solve it by picking up ideas from many books and tutorials. I suggest that now you have seen all the starter kit examples, try to use those parts to do something you find useful. Even if it is just a blinky light to remind you to feed the fish.
If you are really stuck for ideas, look at Instructables. But I warn you the quality of those projects is universally awful. Don't copy any of their code or their assembly practices. But the ideas are great.
One thing I do that has "furthered" my knowledge (still pretty green myself) is to read the threads here. If I see someone having an issue with a project that I have access to similar hardware for, I use their "requirements" and try to write a code of my own from scratch with all kinds of comments. Once I have it working, I file it away. And later, if I see a snippet of code that does what one of mine does only in a better way, I'll update my originals.
For example, in the beginning, I used a lot of "if/else" statements. Then I learned about and studied up on switch/case. And that made several of my codes much simpler and way better.
Point is, keep your eyes open for a challenge. They're everywhere on this forum. Just don't take on something you KNOW is way above your skills. That will discourage you rather quickly. I know that from experience.