OK you’ve gotten your Arduino set up and also figured out how to use the software to send sketches to the board. Powerful stuff!
But…just running example sketches is a little boring. What we really want to do is use our own creativity and skill to write new sketches! That’s what we’ll be doing in this lesson.
We’ll start off easy by just modifying something that already works. You might not expect it, but most of the time as a hardware and software artist will just be modifying someone else’s code examples!
This is known as the “Hey let’s change something and see what happens” programming technique. It may not be formally taught, but everyone does it!
To start we will venture deep into the Blink sketch, looking at each line and trying to understand what its doing.
Then we will start hacking the sketch, and maybe even meet an internationally-famous DJ and design custom hardware for him!
Make a robot friend with Adafruit’s CRICKIT – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express, FEATHER and other platforms to make and program robots with CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. Start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. You also get signal pins, capacitive touch sensors, a NeoPixel driver and amplified speaker output. It complements & extends your boards so you can still use all the goodies on the microcontroller, now you have a robotics playground as well.
