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I wanted to learn more about arduino programming and uno boards and such. I see there are many different learner kits with an arduino uno or mega 2560 board available. I wondered if anyone has ever tried one and if they are worth looking at.

Thanks
Tony

Arduino family of products and the many clones are a good introduction to microcontrollers. The experimenter's kits are great if you don't already have a general assortment of electronic components. Sparkfun and Adafruit are two of the best resources for such kits and tutorials, but there are many choices including the auction site.

The main functional difference between the uno and the mega is the number of i/o pins available. For learning purposes, either one is fine.

As for kits, it really depends on what's in them and what you are trying to learn. The better kits are a decent way to get started for a raw beginner. If you're primarily after the programming aspect, you might be better off with one of the electronic brick style kits(pre-built modules you connect with cables). If you're also interested in the electronics aspect, then a prototype breadboard and components kit would be more appropriate.

Here's one tutorial that covers most of the basics and gathers a lot of arduino info in one spot: http://arduino-info.wikispaces.com/. The kits he sells are decent examples of starter kits, but of course you can buy somewhere else and still make use of the tutorial.

There are oodles of other online resources. Google something like "learn arduino" and explore.

Earthbound wrote:Arduino family of products and the many clones are a good introduction to microcontrollers. The experimenter's kits are great if you don't already have a general assortment of electronic components. Sparkfun and Adafruit are two of the best resources for such kits and tutorials, but there are many choices including the auction site.

Thanks Earthbound. I haven't looked at Sparkfun yet!

Eric wrote:The main functional difference between the uno and the mega is the number of i/o pins available. For learning purposes, either one is fine.
Here's one tutorial that covers most of the basics and gathers a lot of arduino info in one spot: http://arduino-info.wikispaces.com/. The kits he sells are decent examples of starter kits, but of course you can buy somewhere else and still make use of the tutorial.

There are oodles of other online resources. Google something like "learn arduino" and explore.

Thanks Eric, I have looked online quite a bit and there is lots and yes "oodles" of resources. I am a raw beginner and interested in both the programming and hardware aspect. I really enjoy messing with the Rambo board.

Go for it.

Lcd plus uno costs 11usd on some sites. You basically have nothing to lose.

think of a project for yourself. Post it here. We can select the components. Then you can be on your way.

teoman wrote:Go for it.

Lcd plus uno costs 11usd on some sites. You basically have nothing to lose.

think of a project for yourself. Post it here. We can select the components. Then you can be on your way.

Sweet!!

There are several kits out there. I got the ARDX one for my son and I. It is pretty good. They are all similar. I already had a couple 2560s and I found the ARDX without an arduino included. We had and still have fun with this little kit. My son is 15. He is getting into programming and more technical arduino stuffs!

http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/ARDX-T ... -1153.html

Kits are also available on Amazon.com.

https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/teensy31.html

Teensy 3.1 works with the Arduino IDE. However, the microcontroller is exponentially more capable. It has 64K RAM (instead of 2K), 256K EEPROM (instead of 32K), runs at up to 96MHz (instead of 16MHz), etc. Most of the device drivers for Arduino (displays, RGB LEDs, etc.) are also available on Teensy.

The only drawback is that it's not in the standard Arduino form factor, so it won't work with Arduino "shields" unless you wire each pin to where it's supposed to go (and the Teensy would need to have a compatible device driver, if it's something like a display or whatever). However, because of the faster MCU, and the fact that it has a DMA controller, it's been shown (with real world numbers) that a Teensy can draw graphics to an Arduino-compatible display several times faster than an Arduino can. If you care about your displays looking nice, and your users not saying to themselves, "This thing is so slow I can see it drawing every individual frame," the Teensy is a good way to get much better performance.

I started work on an Arduino-based clock a couple years ago, using the ATMega644 CPU (like Arduino but with 4K RAM, and runs at 20MHz) but it just killed me. I was always running out of memory. I switched over to Teensy and continued my work, and I've never come anywhere close to running out of RAM. (Which is hardly surprising, since I have 16 times as much of it. Or 32 times, if we're talking about a regular Arduino.) The increased clock speed has allowed me to add all kinds of cool stuff, like a physics simulator and interchangeable pixel shaders that I can use to generate far more interesting effects. I would not be simulating physics or abstracting the graphics down to a shader level if I was still on a much, much slower Arduino. It just gives me so much more breathing room.

Another option would be Raspberry Pi. That does come in a form factor designed for shields. It doesn't work with Arduino shields, but there are tons of Raspberry Pi-specific shields out there that do everything from drawing graphics to a display (including X-Windows!) to running a freespace gesture sensor. There are experimenter kits and you can program it in just about any language you want. (Arduino and Teensy are usually programmed using the Arduino IDE, which has a bunk old nonstandard C++ compiler with Arduino extensions that makes it act schizophrenic compared to a regular C++ compiler. You have to learn a lot of its vagaries.)