Tech Things to do with the Kids over the Holidays #2 (Arduino)

Article #1 of this series covered some things to do with the kids involving a Raspberry Pi. This article goes into another fun learning platform that teaches hardware, programming, and to make and do different projects, this time using an Arduino.

We're fiddling with both the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino with the kids, Raspberry Pi is a miniature computer, has a multi-core CPU, GBs of storage, runs Linux, so it's making a small computer do things. Arduino has 32Kb of memory (yes, kilobytes), the "code" is very simple 10-20 lines for a typical program, the boards run $6ea for really tiny system boards that'll run off low power batteries for days. So every couple weeks we switch between what complex thing we can build with a Raspberry Pi to push the limits of a $20 "computer", to building things with Arduino in as small, compact, and simplistic manner with a tiny $6 board/computer.

An Arduino is a simple computer system that you can program to do various things, from something as simple as a night light, to something complex like an robotic submarine. Even though these things are inexpensive, we've done some pretty complex creative things with Arduino..

As an example, here's a submarine we created. It has one $6 Arduino as the brain for the transmitter, and another $6 Arduino as the brain for the receiver. With fewer than 50-lines of code, we can wirelessly control this submarine up to a mile away (and at this point we put a 12-foot dive cable on it, so it'll go down to the bottom the pond in the local park up the street from us)!

However, before you get too crazy with this stuff, start with the basics. We bought a kit off Amazon, their Elegoo Super Starter Kit for $30 that has the Arduino Uno board and 100+ parts and pieces with a PDF download for basic step by step instructions to build 20+ projects. The kit provides you all the pieces you need to get a project working in the first 30-minutes and then a number of other projects that build on the knowledge of the user.

There are a lot of other similar kits out there, Elegoo even has a $50 Mega/Ultimate kit, but I found that by the time you do 20 projects with the Super Starter, you either are interested or not. If you are interested, Elegoo has a bunch of "add-on" packs that you can build on top of the Super Starter kit, and actually we diverted and went rogue and just started googling "Arduino Projects" off the Internet and found a bunch of things even more fun than what was in these various "kits", like the remote control submarine we created.

If you want to review the documentation that comes with these Elegoo kits, go to Elegoo’s Download Site https://www.elegoo.com/download/ and the downloads of interest is the "Elegoo Uno R3 The Most Complete Start Kit (for the Uno R3 board)"

I did all these projects with my 8-year old, together. A teenager could jump in and do these things on their own (as long as they are self-motivated to fiddle). These things are not overly complex, they're building blocks for learning some electronics stuff, some programming stuff, some trial and error things.

Oh, and here's another thing we created, a binary clock, got a $10 light panel, wrote a 30-line program, the thing shows us the time in binary... How about that fancy "case" we put the Arduino in and taped the LED panel to, a butter box :-)

The fun part is googling ("arduino projects") to figure out what else you can build, from things like motion sensor devices, to infrared triggers, to remote control vehicles. What can you / your kids devise???