Mastering Arduino

A project-based approach to electronics, circuits, and programming

Jon Hoffman

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781788831628
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Hardware
• Index: Computer Science

Mastering Arduino is a practical, no-nonsense guide that will teach you the electronics and programming skills that you need to create advanced Arduino projects.

Key Features

• Covers enough electronics and code for users at any level
• Includes complete circuit diagrams for all projects
• Final robot project combines knowledge from all the chapters

Book Description

Mastering Arduino is an all-in-one guide to getting the most out of your Arduino. This practical, no-nonsense guide teaches you all of the electronics and programming skills that you need to create advanced Arduino projects. This book is packed full of real-world projects for you to practice on, bringing all of the knowledge in the book together and giving you the skills to build your own robot from the examples in this book. The final two chapters discuss wireless technologies and how they can be used in your projects.

The book begins with the basics of electronics, making sure that you understand components, circuits, and prototyping before moving on. It then performs the same function for code, getting you into the Arduino IDE and showing you how to connect the Arduino to a computer and run simple projects on your Arduino.

Once the basics are out of the way, the next 10 chapters of the book focus on small projects centered around particular components, such as LCD displays, stepper motors, or voice synthesizers. Each of these chapters will get you familiar with the technology involved, how to build with it, how to program it, and how it can be used in your own projects.

What you will learn

• Explains the basics of electronics and circuits along with the Arduino IDE and basic C operations
• Use sensors to build a mini weather station
• Control LEDs using code
• Power a robot arm using stepper motors
• Remotely control your Arduino using RF, Bluetooth LE, and Bluetooth Classic
• Make a sound tone generator with buttons

Who this book is for

Mastering Arduino is for anybody who wants to experiment with an Arduino board and build simple projects. No prior knowledge is required, as the fundamentals of electronics and coding are covered in this book as well as advance projects.

Bluetooth LE

In this book so far, all external communication with our Arduino projects has been in a closed environment. By closed environment, we mean that our project simply received information or direction from a remote control and no information was transmitted out from the project. There are numerous use cases where we need to transmit information from our Arduino project to an external device such as a smartphone or other IoT device. When there is a need such as this, one of the first technologies that is brought up is Bluetooth Low Energy, also known as Bluetooth LE or Bluetooth Smart.

In this chapter, you will learn:

• What Bluetooth LE is
• How the Bluetooth LE radio works
• What the GAP profile is
• What the GATT profile is
• How to use the HM-10 Bluetooth LE radio module with the Arduino

Introduction

One of the most common misunderstandings of Bluetooth LE by people that are not familiar with the technology is that Bluetooth LE is a lightweight subset of Bluetooth Classic. This is not true, as Bluetooth Classic and Bluetooth LE are two fundamentally different protocols with different design goals.

Most wireless technologies, such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Classic, were designed to satisfy a wide range of use cases; however, the design of Bluetooth LE is a bit different. Originally created by Nokia and known as Wibree, the primary design focus of Bluetooth LE was to create a radio standard with the lowest possible power consumption and optimized for low cost, low complexity, and low bandwidth.

Bluetooth LE specifications were released as part of the Bluetooth 4.0 Core specifications in June of 2010. The Bluetooth Core Specifications are overseen and updated by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG).

You can find information about Bluetooth and download the specifications from their site at https://www.bluetooth.com; however, at over 2500 pages, I would recommend that you read this chapter instead of the Bluetooth specifications unless you are looking for help with insomnia.

The adoption rate of Bluetooth LE has been much faster than most other wireless technologies. The reason for this is the adoption of the Bluetooth LE standard in the mobile industry where Apple and Google have put significant effort into including reliable Bluetooth LE stacks with the iOS and Android operating systems and developing easy-to-use-and-understand Bluetooth LE APIs for developers. This makes it very easy for developers to create and interact with devices that have Bluetooth LE radios.

The reason that the mobile industry has been pushing for the adoption of Bluetooth LE is that devices that connect using Bluetooth LE consume far less power, hence the name Bluetooth Low Energy, as compared to other wireless technologies such as Bluetooth Classic and Wi-Fi. This leads to longer battery life for their phones, which leads to happier customers.

Bluetooth devices come in three types, where each type supports either Bluetooth Classic, Bluetooth LE or both. The following chart shows what each type supports:

Device Type	Bluetooth Classic Support	Bluetooth LE Support
Pre-4.0 Bluetooth	Yes	No
Single-Mode	No	Yes
Dual-Mode	Yes	Yes

While the Bluetooth 5.0 specifications were released in June of 2016, at the time this book is being written, there are very few Bluetooth modules for the Arduino that support this new specification. In fact, at this time, there is very little support for the Bluetooth 4.1 or 4.2 specifications either; therefore, in this book, we are going to focus on the Bluetooth 4.0 specifications, knowing that Bluetooth 5.0, 4.2 and 4.1 are all backward compatible with this standard.

In order to design IoT devices that use Bluetooth LE we really need to understand the technology so we know when actually to use it. Therefore, we will delve into this technology a lot further than we have with other technologies in this book. We will start off by looking at the radio specifications.

Bluetooth LE radio

Since we will be using Bluetooth LE 4.0 for all the projects in this book, the following specifications are for this standard:

Range	Up to 100 meters
Radio Frequency	2.402 - 2.481 GHz
Radio Channels	40 (37 data and 3 advertising)
Maximum OTA Data Rate	1 Mbit/s
Application Data Throughput	0.125 Mbit/s
Network Topologies	Point-to-Point
Network Standard	IEEE 802.15.1

Bluetooth LE has a maximum range of 100 meters, but this is very dependent on the surroundings. When the connected devices are indoors, the range will be dramatically reduced due to walls and other obstacles that the radio s...