Tag Archives: STEM

Arduino Tutorial 19: Reading Strings from the Serial Monitor

In lesson 18 you learned how to read integers or floating point numbers into the Arduino from the Serial Monitor. It is also very helpful to be able to read Strings, or words from the Serial Monitor. In this video we show you the ins and outs of reading Strings into the Arduino.

If you want to follow along at home, you can order the Arduino Kit we are using HERE.

Arduino Tutorial 18: Reading Numbers from the Serial Monitor

In many projects, it is very useful to get input from users. You need to be able to prompt the user for input, and then input that information into the Arduino. In most cases, users will not know how to program, so you need to have an easy way to interact with them. In earlier lessons, we showed how you can send messages or information from the Arduino using the Serial Monitor. In today’s lesson, we show you how to read input from the user through the Serial Monitor.

If you want to follow along at home, you can order the Arduino Kit we are using HERE.

Arduino Tutorial 17: Understanding Arduino While Loops

In the last two lessons you have learned the ins and outs of programming with For Loops. There are similar loops called While Loops. In this video we show you how to program using While Loops. Anything that can be done with a For Loop can also be done with a While Loop. Which one you use is just a matter of preference. For me, I often times would prefer to use While Loops. If you want to follow along at home, you can order the Arduino Kit we are using HERE.

Arduino Tutorial 14: Dimmable LED Project

You have actually learned quite a bit in the first 13 lessons, and now we are ready to bring it all together in an interesting project. In this lesson, we will show you how to build a dimmable LED. You will read values from a potentiometer, and then based on what value you read, you will set the brightness of the LED. This is a really cool little project, and will no doubt get you thinking about bigger and better things.  If you want to follow along at home, you can order the Arduino Kit we are using HERE.

 

 

Arduino Tutorial 7: Understanding the Arduino Analog Write Command

In earlier lessons we learned how to turn pins on and off with the Arduino digitalWrite command. This is great if you only want 0 or 5 volts. In this lesson we show how you can get the in between values by using the analogWrite command. In later lessons we will show more specifically how analogWrite works, but this present lesson gets you started, and shows you how to control brightness of an LED. In all these lessons we are using the Arduino Super Starter Kit, which you can pick up HERE.