Rob,

With your machine code grounding you should find it all pretty straightforward. As for the kit, is this too expensive, https://store.arduino.cc/usa/arduino-starter-kit?

Cheers, Colin

+1 Definitely worth a read.

Hi Rob

As Ian has suggested, Paul McWorter is to be recommended. He's a professional teacher & trainer which makes all the difference. I can also highly recommend Peter Dalmaris over at udemy.com:

https://www.udemy.com/arduino-sbs/

For a (very) few £/€/$ you get 23 hours of video instruction, handouts, and support. I think it offers amazing value for money.

Starter kits are convenient, but not always good value.If you're comfortable with a soldering iron and veroboard you don't have to spend very much at all.

I think I can shed some light on the programming aspect. The Arduino IDE tries to make programming easier for beginners but can be confusing if you have some experience.

The language used is often said to be C but is in fact C++ . A sketch is essentially a source code file. When you compile the IDE generates a header file so you do not have to provide prototypes for functions. There is a main function but it is in the library – it just calls setup and then loop repeatedly.

Let me know if I can help with other confusions.

Go for it -buy the thing and a book or two, not much money and you will learn something. My problem is I have to learn a complete new language, words don't mean what I think they mean. But you will get past this eventually. I bought one and when the winter comes hope to make progress.

I too am about to dive into Arduino and have a few books on the subject, I have a locksmith project which needs 3D printing, stepper motors and Arduino and just this week have started an introduction to AutoCAD course

A couple of additional resources I found useful

Humble Book Bundles – I bought several e-books for a pittance on various Arduino / 3D printing projects

MakerFaire Newcastle – Two days of hacking, making and inspiration, next event is April 2018 and I shall spend both days immersed

Dive in, life is too short not to

Correct. The code is in main.cpp . The exciting part looks like this:

It can be seen that main.cpp does some private setting up, calls setup() once, and then calls loop() forever, checking the serial interface each time round. As expected on a microcontroller, main() never returns. The built-in main() just makes life a bit simpler for Arduino programmers by hiding a few details.

It's possible to substitute your own main() if there's a need. But that's advanced stuff, making it likely that you are providing your own hardware as well. In that case, something like avrdude would be more suitable for development than the Arduino tool-set.

In that case, you might enjoy programming arduinos (well the AVR chips on them) in AVR assembler. No nasty abstractions to spoil the experience and hugely powerful chips!

Neil

I was given an Uno for Christmas and took some while to get any idea what to do: I have previously programmed in Visual Basics and VBA,but not for a long time. I found the reference section on the Arduino website **LINK** and the forum on the same site to be really helpful.

I finally managed to progamme a clock to operate on the seconds, minutes, hours, strike the quarters and hours and turn the chimes on and off at night. All it needs now is the mechanics of the clock to display the time on a dial……….

Regards,

James.

I just want to add something for anyone who comes along looking for arduino info , one of the books that i used is arduino workshop – a good starting point but not sure if available in all countries .

One of the best things about arduino is if you have a pc , an internet connection and a few dollars you are in business !

One of the things Paul Mcworter keeps harping on about is keeping your sketch neat and tidy , if you look around on youtube or the internet you will find many sketches are difficult to read many don't work or won't compile and if your lucky the IDE will tell you whats wrong .

Ian.

I'm also a relative newcomer to Arduino along with its C/C++. As someone who has only played with BASIC at very much a novice level I can understand the difficulty some people may find.

Before even attempting to write code I think the real solution is to draw up a robust flow chart of what you are trying to achieve. This way you are likely to cover all eventualities and thus lead towards robust code.