Very Very board! Please help! :)

Projects General Guidance
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Hey Arduino fans. IT is my summer break and at the moment I have nothing to do! I have a really need to make some thing! Could someone suggest some thing? Quite simple as my programming skills are not the best! :confused: It would be much appreciated!

P.S Does any one have any book ideas to learn how to program with the arduino I don't really need it for the circuitry skills as I know all of that. But just programming as I struggle with the interface at the moment :slight_smile: Thank you again Trevor Boultwood

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http://www.arduinobook.com/ He has lots of books and he posts here from time to time to help people.

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Note, I'm coming at it from the other end, 33+ years of programming, but little electronics.

Well, one place a lot of people start with is the learning section on Arduino.cc, which gives examples of ways to control various things: http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/HomePage.

Once you get beyond the blinky light, read from a pot., simple servo and motor control, then you need to think of automating something that interests you. The trick is to pick something challenging that it will take some amount of work to master, but it is not so complex that it is so beyond your current skills that you get frustrated and leave. And it doesn't have to be a single thing, you could do several small projects, each giving you new things to learn.

So forget the low level Arduino bits right for the moment, concentrate on something you want to work on. Think about it at the 50,000 foot/meter level, and at a high level, what does this project do? Think of it in terms what is called the elevator pitch -- where you meet a potential backer in an elevator, and you have 1-2 minutes to describe what the thingy does. Not the low level code to move the servo or blink the light, what problem does it solve, and how does it do it? Then, once you have the high level idea of what the thing does, you can iterate further to think about feasibility, cost, time, etc.

Now, it may be that your project is too complex for an Arduino (for example, anything involving video processing, beyond the simplest low level stuff), or too complex for any skill sets you can aquire in the next few weeks. Bouncing ideas off people here can help you refine your initial goals to be simpler to meet in time/budget/interest/ability constraints. But we can't say what to build, that has to come from you.

As an example, I have a couple of camera based projects roaming through my head that I've been thinking about tackling:

  • In my steampunk camera, I've been hooking up a telegraph key to fire the camera via the wired shutter release. I generally connect the key directly to the shutter release cable, wiring both the focus and fire wires together to one side, and the ground wire to another. When contact is made, it tells the camera to fire. Unfortunately, since I often use live view on the camera, my particular camera is somewhat slow in focusing in live view, and I would like to make sure the camera is focused before going to the fire step. I would want the Arduino to only connect ground and focus when the telegraph key makes contact, and when it goes from contact to non-contact, it would then connect both the fire and focus wires to ground to tell the camera to shoot. Or use a 555 circuit for this, but at the moment, I'm going with the Arduino. My current work around is to put a wired shutter release under the key, and use the key to press the shutter release, but I would like to have the key wired directly into the Arduino, and not use the wired shutter release.
  • One of my side interests has been servo's, and I've been thinking of using a servo to press the camera shutter button, to allow for remote firing of cameras that don't have wired shutter releases such as my point & shoot camera. I don't need to do this project, but I think it will be fun.
  • Getting back to the steampunk camera, I would like to zoom the lens under Arduino control, using either a servo or hobby motor to rotate the lens.
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cyclegadget:
http://www.arduinobook.com/ He has lots of books and he posts here from time to time to help people.

I HIGHLY recommend this book. The author is active on here under the name of Si.