Today, Carmen decided that she wanted to give Arduino programming a try. She’s an experienced programmer, but had never tried any of this small embedded stuff, and knows relatively little about electronics, but with a little direction from me, she got the Arduino development environment installed, and we did a bit of playing around. I showed how we could blink an LED, and then showed her how to read switches and even drive a servo motor. She then walked through some of Lady Ada’s tutorials and ended up scavenging a red, green, and yellow LED from some old throwies we had, and coding up a little stop light application:

Here’s the code:

[sourcecode lang=”cpp”]
// Stoplight
// Introductory Arduino program – Carmen & Mark VandeWettering 12/11/11
// with thanks to : http://www.ladyada.net/learn/arduino/lesson3.html
//
int redPin = 12; // Red LED connected to digital pin 12
int greenPin = 11; // Green LED connected to digital pin 11
int yellowPin = 13; // Yellow LED connected to digital pin 13
int delayTime = 1000; // initiate a delaytime amount here

void setup() // run once, when the sketch starts
{
pinMode(redPin, OUTPUT); // sets the digital pin as output
pinMode(greenPin, OUTPUT); // sets the digital pin as output
pinMode(yellowPin, OUTPUT); // sets the digital pin as output
}

void loop() // run over and over again
{
digitalWrite(redPin, HIGH); // sets the Red LED on
delay(delayTime); // waits the delayTime
digitalWrite(redPin, LOW); // sets the Red LED off
digitalWrite(greenPin, HIGH); // sets the Green LED on
delay(delayTime*5); // waits the delayTime * 5
digitalWrite(yellowPin, HIGH); // sets the Yellow LED on
digitalWrite(greenPin, LOW); // sets the Green LED off
delay(delayTime); // waits the delayTime
digitalWrite(yellowPin, LOW); // sets the Yellow LED off (and continue the loop)
}
[/sourcecode]

If you have any experience with programming at all, the Arduino should be pretty easy. If you don’t, it will take a bit more work, but it’s still doable. Give it a try!