Five Fantastic Projects for Arduino Beginners

The Arduino, a pocket-sized computer (also called a "micro-controller"), is good at doing what your computer can’t and could be programmed and used to control circuits. Although the computers we use every day are powerful, they’re terrible at knowing what’s going on around them,for example, your laptop isn’t exactly equipped to sense light or moisture. Arduino, on the other hand, is specifically designed to stay keyed in to the outside world. It’s equipped with a board full of inputs and outputs for sensors to simplify communication. It interacts with the outside word through sensors, leds, motors, speakers... even the internet; this makes it a flexible platform for lots of creative projects. Some popular uses include: - programmable light displays that respond to music or human interaction - robots that use information from sensors to navigate or perform other tasks - unique, customizable controllers and interfaces for music, gaming, and more - connecting real world objects to the internet - anything interactive - automating and prototyping and so on. Regardless of which Arduino model you buy, the utility of the micro-controller comes out when you use it for “Internet Of Things” projects—whether you want to connect to the real world, the cloud, or both, Arduino makes it easy. Here are plenty of Arduino Projects posted online, but I wanna recommend several special-and-fantastic projects for you. Twitter Mood Light - The World's Mood in a Box The Arduino connects directly to any wireless network via the wifi module, continually searches Twitter with emotional content, collates the tweets for each emotion, and then fades the color of the LED to reflect the current World Mood; Red for Anger, Yellow for Happy, Pink for Love, White for Fear, Green for Envy, Orange for Surprise, and Blue for Sadness. If an unexpectedly high number of tweets of a particular emotion are found, then the LED will flash to alert us to the possibility of a world event that has caused this unusual strong emotional reaction. The project could be powered by: an Arduino, a wifi wireless module, an RGB LED, Twitter.com and a 9v battery. You could click HERE to see the original. Singing plant. Make your plant sing with Arduino, touche and a gameduino Making a plant sing has been a trick since the Theremin was invented. Now it could be accomplished with an arduino board, a gameduino shield and the touch shield. You can certainly use the jack connector directly mounted on the Gameduino shield. Besides, two buttons,a couple of Alligator clips and enclosure are needed for projects. You could click HERE to see the original. Polargraph Drawing Machine This machine, a variation on the hanging-pen plotter, is a conspicuous and willfully naive attempt to break out of the pristine, pixel perfect, colour-corrected space that exists inside our computers. It's a drawing machine that takes a pen (a human tool) and draws in a singularly robotic way with some grand results. You may need micro-controller, Arduino Uno(or compatible),motor drivers, motoshield v1. A modern classic. Note: you are supposed to look for motors with a current rating of around 600mA (0.6A) and power supply of 1 amp (1000mA) Variable voltage AC/DC . You could click HERE to see the original. A blinking LED light This program is based on the open-source Blink sketch, you can find it on Arduino’s official site. First, set up the hardware by sticking the LED’s two prongs into GND and pin 13 on the Arduino. If you plan on keeping an LED plugged into a turned-on Arduino for an extended period of time, it’s safer to use a 220 ohm resistor. Here’s a diagram of what that would look like, courtesy of the Arduino official site. One of the prongs is slightly shorter than the other—that shorter prong is the negative lead, and therefore the one that goes in the “ground” or GND input/output. You could click HERE to see the original. Arduino Based Digital Clock with Alarm This Arduino based Real time clock is a digital clock to display real time using a RTC IC DS1307 which works on I2C protocol. Real time clock means it runs even after power failure. When power is reconnected, it displays the real time irrespective to the time and duration it was in off state. An Alarm option is also added and we can set up the alarm time. Once alarm time it saved in internal EEPROM of Arduino, it remains saved even after reset or electricity failure. Real time clocks are commonly used in our computers, houses, offices and electronics device for keeping them updated with real time. You could click HERE to see the original. Follows shared SIX open-source Arduino kits for your projects: [table id=6 /]