To get started with these Arduino tutorials, you need seven things:
If you’d like to have more fun get some piezos (buzzers!) and some light sensors. We’ll talk more about those later, though.
HELPER BEE: I’ve set up an AMAZON SHOPPING LIST if you’d like to buy them all from one place
Let’s go over each of the pieces so you have a clue what they are.
For an Arduino, we’ll be using the extremely common and extremely inexpensive Uno R3. It’s just the Revision 3 of a board called the Uno.
There are a ton of other boards - like the Due and the Mega etc etc - some of which will work with these guides and some of which won’t. In doubt? Don’t worry, just try it out.
As we talked about in the introduction, Arduino is open-source, which means any person or any company can produce their own. The company name or price point doesn’t really matter, as long as the words “Arduino Uno R3” are somewhere in the description you should be good to go.
Your USB cable should be a male USB-A to a male USB-B. Looks like this:
It’s used to send programs to your Arduino and also to keep it powered.
That kind of USB cable is the same kind that probably connects to your printer, and might have come with your Arduino. If not, you can find one at Best Buy or Amazon or even an office supplies store.
The Arduino software is also known as an IDE - Integrated Development Environment. That just means “a place where you type your program that can also send it to the Arduino.” It runs on your computer and talks to your Arduino when it’s plugged in.
We’ll call it the IDE because I hate typing out “Arduino software.”
To get the IDE, visit https://www.arduino.cc/en/main/software and download the one that’s right for your operating system. When you try to download they’ll ask you to donate, but if you’re low on cash look for the Just Download button.
LEDs are just little light bulbs, the letters stand for light emitting diode. When you send electricity through them they light up! If you send too much electricity through them, though, they burn out, which is why you need resistors (next up).
Resistors are used to reduce the power of the electricity flowing through a circuit. If there was an electricity gym where little sparks went inside and came out as big powerful thunderbolts, resistors are the opposite.
You use them because LEDs want a little less electricity than an Arduino sends out.
Resistors usually come in huge packs of a ton of different power levels (well, resistance levels). Just buy a nice big box of a thousand, it’ll only cost you maybe $10.
A breadboard is a playground for wires. Lots of little holes to plug into, they help you connect circuits without having to physically tie wires together.
Breadboards are practically mandatory for keeping things organized. We’ll go over them more in Step 3: Breadboarding.
Your wires might have little square things near the ends to keep them neat (called jumper wires), or they might not. Doesn’t matter to me! Wires are wires are wires, although jumper wires might be a little easier to deal with.
Instead of keeping your clothes together, we’ll be using these buttons to interact with our Arduino. When you’re talking about Arduino stuff, buttons are filed under the category of switches.
There are two kinds of buttons - ones that stay down when you push them and ones that don’t. The ones that don’t stay down are usually a ittle cheaper and it’s probably what you’ll end up buying (even accidentally). They’re called momentary switches. You could do worse than reading this Amazon review if you want some more info on them.
Now that you have your supplies all together, let’s head to First Steps to get things cookin’.