What Was Your First Arduino Project?

Community General Discussion
1

Hi everyone,

I'm curious to hear about everyone's first experience with Arduino. What was the very first Arduino project you built, and how did it turn out? Was it a simple LED blinking project, a sensor-based setup, a robot, a home automation project, or something else?

I'd also love to know what challenges you faced as a beginner and what advice you would give to someone just getting started with Arduino today. Looking forward to seeing the projects that got everyone hooked on electronics and programming!

2

I started with some youtube tutorials. My first project was simply blinking an LED. I did about 30 tutorials from one series online. A lot of them I have forgotten, but I know what I am looking for if I need to go back and refresh my memory.

Once I started building my own projects, my biggest hurdle for my coding style was figuring out WHERE to record millis() to properly use it somewhere else in the code.

I have built some real and usable projects, but many of my projects are not physical projects with outputs to components. I like to think of a scenario and write code for it using edge based serial prints so I can see what the code ought to be doing. That is fun for me, and good practice. I was never into video games as a kid or adult. But I have discovered I like coding and can waste to much time with that if I am not careful.

One can almost assume, if the actual project was properly wired using the proper components, the outputs should be doing what they should be doing if the serial prints reveal what is going on.

3

My first Arduino project is still running today. I converted my kitchen to LED lighting, including the ceiling lights, under-cabinet lights, and toe-kick lighting. Some are powered directly from 120 VAC, while others use 12 VDC. Everything is controlled by wall-mounted push buttons: a short press turns the lights on or off, and holding the button adjusts the brightness up or down.

That was many years ago, and it has operated flawlessly ever since.

I already had a background in embedded systems, so I skipped most of the beginner tutorials. After spending some time with the Arduino IDE documentation and the AVR datasheets, I had most of what I needed to get started.

The biggest learning curve wasn't the hardware, it was C++. My background was in assembly language, so adapting to C++ took the most effort. Once I became comfortable with it, the rest came together fairly quickly.

4

My first "project" involved changing the value of the delay()s in the Blink sketch

After experimenting for about a month my first real project was to enable me to read the voltage of the battery of my wife's mobility scooter on my mobile 'phone using Bluetooth. She suffers from range anxiety when using the scooter and I wanted to monitor the actual battery voltage when it was in use taher then the voltage when it was at rest.

I had a background in programming in BBC BASIC, Z80 assembler and a curious language called MUMPS, all as an amateur. I had also built my own radio control gear from kits as I flew model aircraft. As a result I was OK with logical thinking and program flow and basic hardware so just needed to get the hang of C. I made no use of C++ features such as OOP beyond the libraries that I used.

The project was a success from my point of view but my wife has never got over her range anxiety, but I can see the battery state in some detail.

In a homage to "This is Spinal Tap" the range of my wife's latest mobility scooter has improved dramatically as it has an 8 LED bar chart indicating battery state rather than 4 on her previous one !

5

My first project (sorry, it's in Spanish) and it still works as well as the first day.

6

My first project was actually my College Final project. I made a "Grab Bot" using legos.

This is it HERE

I used an Arduino Uno for the bot and a Samsung Galaxy tablet as the controller. I made my own motor driver (I don't remember the ICs I used), the motors themselves were medium Lego motors. Two drove the bot and one opened/closed the claw. I used a HM-06 bluetooth module to allow the tablet to communicate with the bot. I could also control it with a basic bluetooth dongle connected to my laptop via Putty and simple characters WASD. I also used the ultrasonic ping sensor to detect objects.

As for the tablet, I used Eclipse to design the UI as well as the bluetooth connection socket.

I got an A for it and actually did better than my friend who used a roomba and an object detection software. (of which I don't think he wrote)

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void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);
  Serial.println("Hello, World!");
}

void loop() {}

Have only one forum account.

This is totally different from "Arduino." Not everyone gets hooked on the same thing. My "electronics hook" was a superheterodyned AM receiver... long before I touched a computer. The MOS6502 was what got me hooked on computers.

8

Hi toney01. I have a question for you! Are you a bot?

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image1253×840 88.9 KB

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I second that.

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Nope, not a bot.

I was genuinely curious about how everyone got started with Arduino. It's one of those things where almost everyone has a different first project and story behind it.

Reading through the replies has actually been pretty interesting. Some people started with the classic blinking LED, while others jumped straight into much bigger projects than I would have attempted as a beginner.

Thanks to everyone who shared their experiences. It's been fun reading them and seeing how many different paths people took into the Arduino world.