MCU Beginners SparkFun Tutorials

For all us microcontroller (MCU) beginners, there are many online tutorials and other helpful web resources about electronics and related MCU topics.

A worthwhile set of tutorials for beginners participating in the Humboldt Microcontrollers Group learning the basics of using microcontrollers sessions is the SparkFun Tutorials. According to the website there are 193 tutorials in the SparkFun collection. A beginner could spend weeks just reading the tutorials and never get any MCU hardware circuits built or software / firmware programs written for the MCUs. And if you start looking around at electronics tutorials that arent on the SparkFun site, youll have months of reading to plow through what the web has to offer.

As an alternative to having MCU and electronics beginners spend weeks or months reading tutorials, this post will point you to two particular SparkFun tutorials you may want to read if youre doing the first three Jeremy Blum Arduino Basics video tutorials and you know nothing or very little about electronics.

In Jeremys #2 video, one of the steps is to connect a resistor to the breadboard. Resistors come with many different values or resistances, which is often measured in ohms. Because you need to use resistors with specific values for different circuits, and because resistors dont have numbers on them to tell you how many ohms their resistance is, you need to be able to interpret the resistor color code to chose the correct value resistor for a given circuit. The SparkFun Resistors tutorial will explain the color code and many other facts about resistors.

In Jeremys #2 video, he also uses an electronics multimeter. Youll need to use the multimeter to
measure or check many things when you go through the Arduino Basics video tutorials and probably in every electronics project you do after you finish learning the basics of microcontrollers. If you have previously used a multimeter and know how to use it to measure voltage, amperage and resistance, youre all set and dont need this tutorial. But if youre like me and havent used a multimeter for a few years, or havent ever used one, you probably want to read over the SparkFun How to Use a Multimeter tutorial, or maybe the instruction manual for the multimeter youre going to use for your MCU or electronics work. As you can see from this picture of a SparkFun digital multimeter, there are quite a few settings for the meter selector switch, and only one of them will be the correct setting to use for checking a specific electronic component or circuit.

As you go through the Arduino Basics video tutorials, there will be other topics you need to figure out or read about. If you like the SparkFun tutorials, check to see if they have a tutorial for your specific topic of interest. If they dont have a tutorial appropriate to your needs, do a Google search and youll find lots of other tutorials or pages explaining the basics of whatever youre interested in. Another resource to remember is Wikipedia --- its almost always a good first stop to read about the basics of any topic, including electronics.

A future post on this blog will list a bunch of links to online resources for microcontrollers. If you have any specific resources to suggest, or if you would like to see resources listed for a specific topic, send me an email at arcatabob (at) gmail [dott] com.

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Light Up Your Life With MCU Controlled RGB LEDs

This evening I saw a recent EE Times article about using Arduinos to control RGB LEDs (red, green, blue light emitting diodes).

One of the first things that many people learn how to control with a microcontroller is an LED. It seemed like it would be good to learn a little more about LEDs, so I read the EE Times article. All I know about so far about LEDs and microcontrollers is how to light them up and that I should make sure to have an adequate pull-up resistor so I dont burn out the LED by putting too much current through it. I think. (For more on pull-up and pull-down resistors, see the Wikipedia entry or the article about the topic on ResistorGuide.com.)

The title of the EE Times article was a bit misleading because it specifies an LED lighting project, but that project was not mentioned again until the last paragraph of the article.

While the article was disappointing in terms of living up to its title, it did spur me to ask Google to fetch some information based on the keyword combo Arduino RGB LED. Google nicely did as requested, and it turns out there are a number of tutorials on how to control RGB LEDs with an Arduino. Likely lots of advanced tricks with RGB LEDs or interesting RGB LED projects could be found by reading through more of the search result for the above keyword combination, or by adding a fourth search term such as projects.

A couple RGB LED tutorials come from sources familiar to those who read a lot about Arduinos and microcontrollers. There are an Instructables tutorial and an Adafruit tutorial. The first page of search results also gave me a tutorial from new resource, OscarLiang.net. Havent had time yet to check out OscarLiang, but the RGB LED tutorial looked fairly detailed. RGB LEDs have a distinctive appearance -- the RGBs have four leads instead of the two found on regular LEDs. That may make it a little bit interesting to plug into a breadboard!

If Jeremy Blum doesnt cover RGB LEDs in his first six Arduino Basics video tutorials, Ill work through a couple of the tutorials I found today to learn more about using this type of LED.


In addition to the tutorials, the first page of results did have a couple projects. One was a straightforward Make: Project -- an RGB LED Lamp. Getting a little fancier was a Make: Project titled "Control RGB LEDs with this Android-Arduino Combo-Circuit." Controlling the LEDs with an Android would be kind of fun since I havent run into opportunities to combine Android and Arduinos for a microcontroller project yet. Ill have to see if someone else in the Humboldt Microcontrollers Group wants to work with me on that one. Ill have to research the project and find out how much the components for that cost.

Lastly, a pretty cool Arduino-controlled RGB LED project is the Wormhole Actualization Machine shown on BoingBoing (and other websites) in late May. This was an extremely complex project, at least to me, but the end result was really cool. You have to watch the video for this essentially useless but interesting device. Ill bet kids would love playing with it. It would be an interesting project to build, but a person would need to have a bit of extra cash and a strong desire to make what is essentially an interactive art project, or at least thats what it seems like to me. It could also be a movie prop, but if you made the Wormhole Actualization Machine for that reason, then youre going to also need to make a movie to go with the WAM. You make the WAM and the movie -- Ill make the popcorn...

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