Originally developed in 2004 for Italian design students, Arduino soon gained international recognition among the creative developers and engineers circle. With a set of input and output relays connected directly to sensors, Arduino-based projects can interact with the surrounding environment through microcontrollers.
Many compare Arduino to Raspberry Pi, however, not self-sufficient like Pi itself. Arduino technology has made electrical engineering pretty easy. Say, for instance, you wish to create a simple project that’ll make LEDs blink occasionally. Meanwhile, the Raspberry Pi requires some codec libraries and specific OS installation just to give the project a head start.
If you’re eager, to begin with, Arduino boards for the “World Arduino Day” next, now is the time to start but before you make a plunge, dig in some cool projects listed below.
- The always-blinking LED
A LED light that blinks is excellent for starters! Apparently, it seems you’re actually learning about the blink factor in lights but the project is excellent to familiarise you with the technology. In the end, you’ll definitely have a cool ever-blinking LED that looks pretty.
- Arduino-based robot
MAKE magazine highlighted this particular project as an “ideal” for robotics. It’s simple, fast and gives you an edge of tweaking as much as you like for betterment. Initially, you can program the robot to trot on two wheels while avoiding any obstacle in between, kind of smart right!
- The automatic garage door opener
Since Arduino boards are best known to interact with the outside world namely, Internet of Things (IoT); the project would definitely give the finest example of how you can automatically open the garage door from a mobile phone. Just a simple controller powered by this technology would trigger this so, there’s no end to possibilities.
- The talking clock
Now, this project is far elaborating than it looks. LoLs (Lots of LEDs) display shield is used to display time and a speech synthesiser chip to shout out the time allowed. But once the hardware is aligned, software only asks for open-source code download to get the clock powered up and tell you the time.
- The keyboard lock
Arduino can be your personal sentinel to ward off intruders from accessing your computer terminal. The project is also good for starters looking forward to excelling in the electrical engineering niche.
- Twitter-enabled coffee pot
What if you can tweet at your own coffee pot while on-the-move and come home for a fresh brew? The project only asks for four basic hardware components including Arduino-powered chops and a few steps allowing you to impress everyone through the tweets.
- Thermostat
A query is transmitted to your home computer that in return sweeps the Google Calendar to determine a home or apartment’s ideal temperature. Though not pretty by the looks, there isn’t any need of a solder (the fusing metal object with a tool) as Arduino is used.
- Pollutant sensors
There’re many environmental sensors out there to monitor air and water quality be it closed or open-surrounding. These sensors detect the amount of different attributes that constitutes the environment such as nitrogen, carbon, oxygen so on and give results to help scientists and general users conduct further research for the betterment of the ecosystem.
- The Arduino phone
Not entirely new to many, the initial launch of Arduino GSM Shield proposed the idea of converting it into an actual working phone. If you’re actually doing it, be sure to monitor or replace tantalum capacitors because even a tiny mistake and they’ll explode; seriously!
Conclusion
If you’re new to the technology, the above projects would definitely help you to a great start so do try!
