Hi everyone,
I am new to Arduino and just joined the forum. I am really excited to start learning and building some simple projects. If you have any beginner tips, tutorials, or project ideas, I do love to hear them. Looking forward to being part of the community.
Thanks in advance for any input.
Here is a starter book by one of the co founders of Arduino, Massimo Banzi.
Note that that it was written quite a while ago so much has been added to the Arduino space, countless new boards, libraries, IDE changes and the like but reading through this should get you on track as a beginner.
If you Google the title, you may find other places to get this resource if this one isn't available to you for some reason.
I recommend buying Genuino (original) Arduino boards, or at least one or two, before getting a knockoff such as one from Elegoo.
Elegoo is good though. They sell whole kits with components and include tutorials to let you work through all the stuff they include.
I also recommend, if you were going to purchase an Arduino Uno R3 (R4 is quite different, R3 is sort of the default beginner's board), to maybe spend a bit more and get an Arduino Mega. It's very similar to the Uno, but has lots of extras such as much more memory, extra hardware UARTs and extra pins overall.
To supplement your reading, watch some videos about learning Arduino. My pick is Programming Electronics Academy.
Thanks for helping me. I hope this book helps me to start.
My advice would be don't rush to buy an Arduino until you have found out what a shield is and whether you want to use them exclusively for your circuits, or whether you would prefer a wider choice of components, which would mean building prototypes on breadboards and then soldering the final circuit into protoboard, stripboard or even designing your own PCBs.
This decision will point you in one direction or another for your first choice of Arduino models.
Sound advice. Here's a popular manufacturer and online retailer of the sorts of things @PaulRB is referring to.
There are lots of places to shop for components, many such as Mouser or Digikey are also great, likely less expensive, but you have to really know what you're after before shopping in those places.
Adafruit has the added bonus of deeper customer support in terms of project ideas and tutorials for their products, plus they write a lot of their own libraries to help get you coding successfully.
Apologies, it seems my advice was confusing, or at least ambiguous. @hallowed31 has not understood the point I was making.
@moe313 please let me know if you are also confused about the point I was making and I will try to explain in a different way.
It was clear enough. The Adafruit website is a great place to find out what a shield is, what other sorts of components are out there, whether discrete parts like resistors and capacitors or ready-made modules designed for Arduino project purpose.
It's a great place to see videos and tutorials using all sorts of boards, see the kinds of projects that are reasonably within a beginner hobbyist's grasp,
great content such as this:
I was simply pointing out a resource I find useful that any beginner might find useful along the breadboard to DIY PCB pipeline.
or this:
or even this:
Another great resource, I'm sure you'll agree, is
where @moe313 or anyone else can try things out for free, with no risk to components at all.
Thanks for your feedback.
Have you read this yet: