Arduino Basics

Project Description Heart Rate Monitors are very popular at the moment. There is something very appealing about watching the pattern of your own heart beat. And once you see it, there is an unstoppable urge to try and control it. This simple project will allow you to visualize your heart beat, and will calculate your heart rate. Keep reading to learn how to create your very own heart rate monitor.   Parts Required: Arduino UNO or compatible board Grove Base Shield Grove Ear-clip Heart Rate Sensor Grove Universal 4 pin cables LED and 330 ohm resistor Fritzing Sketch         Grove Base Shield to Module Connections     Arduino Sketch   ...

Arduino is an "open source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board". It is also a "development environment for writing software for the board" (Source: Arduino.cc ). The first Arduino was born in 2005 in the classrooms of Interactive Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy. A nice presentation which shows a timeline of "how Arduino came to be" can be found here .   Arduino has been a very successful concept and creation. Ten years on, it has become one of, if not, the most popular prototyping and development platforms in the world. It has found it's way into the hearts of many makers, artists, programmers, developers and inventors. It has been used for millions of projects: from automatic garage door openers and tea makers to flamethrowers, robots, lighting displays and sound production. In fact, I cannot think of anything that the Arduino hasn't been used for.   But as you are pretty well...

Create your very own Arduino BeatBox ! Home-made capacitive touch sensors are used to trigger the MP3 drum sounds stored on the Grove Serial MP3 player. I have used a number of tricks to get the most out of this module, and I was quite impressed on how well it did. Over 130 sounds were loaded onto the SDHC card. Most were drum sounds, but I added some farm animal noises to provide an extra element of surprise and entertainment. You can put any sounds you want on the module and play them back quickly. We'll put the Grove Serial MP3 module through it's paces and make it into a neat little BeatBox !! Key learning objectives How to make your own beatbox How to make capacitive drum pad sensors without using resistors How to speed up Arduino's Analog readings for better performance How to generate random numbers on ...