Introduction to Arduino

Mobile Computing, aa. 2016/2017

May 12, 2017

Daniele Ronzani - Ph.D student in Computer Science

dronzani@math.unipd.it
What are Microcontrollers

● Very small and simple computers

● Cheap and useful
● Present in every smart system
● Atmel is one of the family of microcontrollers

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What is the DIY paradigm

● Create something without professional knowledge

● Many fields
○ Programming
○ Education
○ Critical theory
○ Business
○ Electronics
○ ...

3
The Arduino project

Arduino is an open-source electronics

prototyping platform based on flexible,
easy-to-use hardware and software. It's
intended for artists, designers, hobbyists,
and anyone interested in creating interactive
objects or environments.
Arduino UNO Arduino.cc

● An Italian prototyping tool project

● Ready-made electronic products at low costs
● Open Source
● Boards with different performances
● Shields that extend the functions
○ Wi-Fi, GPSR, Ethernet, microSD reader, ...
Shields and sensors
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Some History of Arduino

● Arduino was born in 2005 in Ivrea, Italy

● IDEA: less expensive device for controlling
interactive electronic projects
○ Rapid prototyping

● Name "Arduino" in honor of Bar di Re

Arduino
● Start to produce boards in a small factory
● Arduino was built around the Wiring
project of Hernando Barragan.
○ Hernando's thesis project at the Interaction Design Massimo Banzi
Institute Ivrea.
○ Remove the deep knowledge barriers
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The First Protoype

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Arduino Today

●
●
○

Arduino community is mushrooming across the globe

80% from
Europe and USA

More than 200

distributors

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Some Competitors - 1
● Lego Mindstorm
○ Intelligent brick computer
○ Programmed in Brick Logo
○ Strong community
○ Too much expensive (cost: ~ $349)

● i-cubeX
○ Objects respond to human actions and
environmental parameters
○ Human Interface Devices
○ Easy but expensive

● Phidgets
○ Easy-to-assemble sensors and controllers
○ Not open source (proprietary)
○ Requires less hardware and software knowledge
○ ~ 3.5 x the cost of Arduino board
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Some Competitors - 2

● Make Controller Kit

○ More powerful CPU than Arduino
○ Has quite a lot of "bang for the buck"

● Raspberry
○ It is closer to a computer
○ Includes CPU, USB ports, Ethernet, HDMI, ...
○ Includes an own OS (Linux)

● Teensy
○ Same Arduino firmware
○ Compatible with Arduino
○ Very small size
● UDOO
○ Merges Arduino and Raspberry
○ Powerful prototyping platform
○ Linux or Android OSs
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The three key concepts of Arduino Project

Hardware Environment Community

Can sense the environment Allows to write code in the It is made up of everyone from
by sensors, and affects it by Arduino programming language and to hobbyists, students,
controlling lights, motors, and using the Arduino designers and engineers all
and other actuators. development environment. across the world.

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Why should we use Arduino?

● Simple, academic purposes

● Open source
○ Hardware & Software: permits to manufacture the boards and
software distribution by anyone
■ Arduino compatibile: Canaduino, Freeduino, Linduino, SainSmart, ...
○ GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)

● Opportunistic prototyping
● Community
○ Wiki
○ Forum
○ Tutorials

● Could be used as an IoT starting point

○ Physical computing objects
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● 2006: New Generation (NG)
○ ATmega168
○ First Mini Arduino
● 2007: Portable and
communication
○ i-Bluetooth
○ Sew-through contacts pads
● 2009: Nano and LilyPad
○ New Arduino Mega with
ATmega1280
● 2010: Rapid development
○ Official Arduino Uno
● 2012: Miniaturization and CPU
power enhance
■ LilyPad Simple/Snap and Micro
■ Arduino Due (32 bit)
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Evolution of Arduino

● 2013: 700.000 official boards were sold

● 2016: 17 versions of the Arduino board have been
commercially produced.

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Some Current Arduino Boards

UNO
● Current official reference of Arduino Boards
● Most used and documented board

Mega
● Designed for more complex projects
● 54 digital I/O pins, 16 analog inputs
● ATmega2560

LilyPad
● Designed for e-textiles and wearables projects
● Can be sewn to fabric and to power supplies

Nano
● Compact board similar to the UNO

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Arduino as Physical Computing Platform

Physical Computing involves the design of interactive objects that can

communicate with humans using sensors and actuators controlled by a
behaviour implemented as software running inside a microcontroller.

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Smart Objects in the Internet Of Things

IoT is a new emerging technology where the

things are connected altogether and interact

● Arduino provides the tools

○ Remote processing of data
○ Connection of physical objects to the Internet

● IoT Manifest
○ Open SW & HW:
■ Possibility to share works
■ More innovation
○ Sustainable
■ Devices should be easily upgraded
○ Fair
■ You should have control of your devices
■ Security
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Arduino Cloud

● A new platform to make building IoT

● Creation of tools that allow connection and control of device on/by
the Internet
● MQTT broker makes connection between each object

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Home Control and Automation

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Arduino Usage Examples

Beat Bearing

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Arduino Usage Examples

Twitter Lamp

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TeleBall (Breakout game)

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Other Examples

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Arduino Architecture and
Components

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General Architecture

Main components

● AVR Microcontroller
● Analog and digital I/O pins
● Flash memory
○ Integrated in the microcontroller
● USB port for serial communication

USB

ATmega328

DC power jack

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Components: mandatory

Wires Prototyping board (breadboard)

Resistors and leds

USB connector

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Components: I/O devices

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Components: communication devices

Wired and Wireless comm. devices

Infrared

WiFi
Bluetooth

Zig-Bee

Ethernet

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Characteristics - 1

Arduino UNO (ATmega 328)

Technical characteristics
● Clock speed: 16 MHz (Intel 286: 12.5 MHz) - 8-bit
● Flash program memory: 32 KBytes (0.5 used by bootloader)
● SRAM: 2 KBytes
● Input / Output
○ 14 digital input/output pins
○ 6 analog input pins
○ 6 analog output pins (PWM)
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Characteristics - 2

Layout of Arduino UNO

1 2 3 4
1. Analog Reference pin
2. Digital Ground
3. Digital pins 2-13
4. Digital pins 0-1/Seral In/Out 10

5. Reset Button
5 6
6. In-circuit Serial Programmer
7. Analog In pins 0-5
8. Power and Ground pins
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9. External Power Supply In
10. USB port
8 7

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Digital and Analog pins

● Digital pins have only two values on/off (0/1)

○ Arduino UNO has 14 digital I/O pins
○ To connect devices that read/produce digital values (switch, leds, ...)
● Analog pins use many states using quantization
○ Arduino UNO has 6 input analog pins
○ To read analog sensors (temperature, pressure, ... )
○ An A/D converter of 10 bit returns integers from 0 to 1023

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Digital and Analog pins

● Analog output pins use PWM technique

○ Arduino UNO has 6 digital pins used as PWM (~)
○ The signal is affected on the input pulse duration

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Programming in Arduino

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Life Cycle of a program

power ON

reset

● Declare variables
Global Variables ● Initialize variables

● Run once at beginning

setup() ● Set pins

● Run the main program

loop() ● Repeatedly, after the setup
press reset

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Arduino IDE software

● Friendly Multi Platform application

written in Java
● Allows you to write programs and
upload them to your Arduino board
● Derived by "Processing" IDE
○ Initially developed in 2003 to simplifies
electronic projects
● Very simple for novice programmers
○ Simple programming language
○ Bootloader

● Source code of IDE and library are distributed under the

free GNU GPLv2 license

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Arduino IDE software

● Text editor containing syntax

highlighting and automatic
indentation
● Toolbar
● Text Console
● Compiler
● Serial monitor to debug
○ Allows you to read the data that
Sketch filled with the two Arduino communicates through
basic Arduino functions: the COM serial port
the setup() and loop().

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Online IDE - Web Editor

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Wiring-based Language

● Open Source computer programming language

● Derived by C/C++ language
○ With some slight simplifications and modifications

○ Includes classical libraries and functions

■ Data types (Integer, float, long, character, ...)
■ Operators (Mathematical, logical, comparison, ...)
■ Control statements (If, switch/case, while, for, ...)

● Offer to the programmer simple access to I/O devices

● Wiring programs are called sketch

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Some functions

● pinMode(pin, Input|Output) set pin ledPin as an input

setup() or output
● Serial.begin(9600) talk to the computer at 9600 baud rate
○ Some values: 300, 600, 1200, 2400, 4800, 9600, 14400,
19200, 28800, 38400, 57600, or 115200

● Serial.print(" ... ") write text on Serial Monitor

loop()
● digitalWrite(pin, HIGH|LOW) set a digital pin high/low
● digitalRead(pin) read a digital pin's state
● analogRead(pin) read an a analog pin
● analogWrite(pin, intValue) write an "analog" PWM value
● delay(milliseconds) wait an amount of time

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Arduino's Hello World: LED blinking

/*
Blink
Turn on and off a LED every one second
*/

int ledPin = 13; // LED connected to digital pin 13

void setup()
{
Serial.begin(9600);
pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT); // sets the digital pin as output
}

// the loop routine runs over and over again forever:

void loop()
{
digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH); // turn the LED on (HIGH is the voltage level)
delay(1000); // wait for a second
digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW); // turn the LED off by making the voltage LOW
delay(1000); // wait for a second
}

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Arduino's Hello World: LED blinking

/*
Blink
Turn on and off a LED every one second
*/

int ledPin = 13; // LED connected to digital pin 13 Initialise the variable with the
pin number
void setup()
{
Serial.begin(9600);
pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT); // sets the digital pin as output
}

// the loop routine runs over and over again forever:

void loop()
{
digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH); // turn the LED on (HIGH is the voltage level)
delay(1000); // wait for a second
digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW); // turn the LED off by making the voltage LOW
delay(1000); // wait for a second
}

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Arduino's Hello World: LED blinking

/*
Blink
Turn on and off a LED every one second
*/

int ledPin = 13; // LED connected to digital pin 13

void setup()
{
Serial.begin(9600); Setup the serial
pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT); // sets the digital pin as output
connections and LED
}

// the loop routine runs over and over again forever:

void loop()
{
digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH); // turn the LED on (HIGH is the voltage level)
delay(1000); // wait for a second
digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW); // turn the LED off by making the voltage LOW
delay(1000); // wait for a second
}

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Arduino's Hello World: LED blinking

/*
Blink
Turn on and off a LED every one second
*/

int ledPin = 13; // LED connected to digital pin 13

void setup()
{
Serial.begin(9600);
pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT); // sets the digital pin as output
}

// the loop routine runs over and over again forever: Turn the LED on and off
void loop() continuously in the loop
{
digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH); // turn the LED on (HIGH is the voltage level)
delay(1000); // wait for a second
digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW); // turn the LED off by making the voltage LOW
delay(1000); // wait for a second
}

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LED and Servo control via Android Application

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 Thank you for the attention

Daniele Ronzani
dronzani@math.unipd.it

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