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Hands-on with Arduino Create and Arduino IoT

Arduino Create and Arduino IoT Hands On 760px

This past weekend Arduino fans celebrated Arduino and Genuino Day 2016. In classrooms, maker spaces, and impromptu meet-ups around the world enginerds got together to learn and create with Arduino. At the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation on Berkeley’s Campus, I first heard that Arduino Create had been launched.

In addition to hands-on learning workshops, there was a display of Arduino/Genuino projects by students. In the afternoon, three Arduino co-founders gave a short talk. David Mellis spoke on Machine Learning. Tom Igoe did his first talk on Technology and Humanities. Lastly, Massimo Banzi talked about IoT.

Arduino Day, Mellis, Igoe, Banzi
Arduino Day, Mellis, Igoe, Banzi

Massimo’s IoT discussion related to the earlier announcement that day of Arduino Create. This new platform has a web-based IDE, Arduino Project Hub, and Arduino IoT.

Excited about the announcements, I spent some time with the hackster.io powered Arduino Project Hub and the Arduino IoT.  Here’s my hands-on with Arduino Create.

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How to Turn Your Arduino Prototype Into a Manufacturable Product

arduino prototype to product
This week’s post is from my friend John Teel. I asked him to help answer a common question I receive: “How do you make an Arduino project into a product?” His experience as an electronics design engineer and serial entrepreneur is ideal to talk about going from prototype to product. He has developed tech products that sell in the millions of units. John now helps entrepreneurs, startups, makers, and small companies bring new electronic products to market. Check out the company he founded, Predictable Designs, and his free cheat sheet – 18 Steps to Market for Your New Electronic Product after reading his excellent post below.

Dreaming of bringing a new hardware product to market?  Perhaps you think your product will make the world a better place, or maybe you just dream of making millions of dollars.

Developing a prototype based on an Arduino (Genuino outside the USA), or other development kit, is a great first step.  But there is still much work to do if you want to make your product into something that can be manufactured in volume and sold to the masses.

So I’m going to break down the process for you into a few manageable steps:

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Arduino

MQTT Introduction and Tutorial Part One

MQTT Introduction Part One

MQTT is an easy way for Internet of Things (IoT) devices to communicate with each other. This light-weight protocol can be used with a simple 8-bit Arduino to a Raspberry Pi to a multi-core PC to Amazon Web Services. It is that versatile.

This MQTT Tutorial is broken into two parts. Part one is an MQTT Introduction. You’ll understand how publish/subscribe message brokering works. Next week, Part two will be a tutorial on using MQTT to communicate between a PC, Raspberry Pi, and ESP8266.

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Arduino

Microcontroller state machine with enum tutorial

state-machine-with-enum-tutorial

Flag variables are great, and totally not evil, when you just have two states: ON or OFF. What about when you have multiple states? Is there an option better than creating multiple flag variables?

The C-language has a declaration type just for this purpose. It is called an enumeration, or enum.

Setting up a state machine with enum is a surprisingly simple. Arduino and embedded programmers should use them!

All you need to do is create descriptive tag names, and let the compiler assign them an integer value. Unlike a #define which is just a macro replacement, the compiler treats an enum as your personal variable type.

This behavior comes in handy when you’re creating states for a state machine. I show how to create a simple state machine with enum, to blink an LED with millis(), in this post.

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