It was my birthday recently so I treated myself to an Arduino Uno!

I know I haven’t really made much progress on my Raspberry Pi project (kitchen calender, media player for videos and spotify, weather station, …) but I’d had my eye on an Arduino for a few years. The trouble now is that I can’t decide what to do with it.

The Arduino is very similar to a Pi but it doesn’t have an accessible OS which you can interact with. Essentially an Arduino is the ‘brain’ of an electronic device. You have to wire up electronic components to it and then tell them what to do. e.g. the first project I made was a simple blinking led. You write your programme which controls the input/output pins on the Arduino and then upload it to the device which will run it.

Jenna also got me a soldering iron for my birthday so I’ll get a chance to use it now. In fact here is my first simple project with the led, resistor and wiring soldered together by myself!

I also picked up an Arduino Nano which is the Uno’s tiny brother. Agin, no idea yet what I’ll use them for. I’ll probably try to incorporate them in my RaspPi project somehow. Maybe have the Arduino running a weather station outside and transmitting the relevant data to the Pi for putting on a web front end? Hopefully most of what I do on the Arduino Uno can then be run on the Nano with a much smaller footprint and price tag  (only about £3).

I have never really done any true electronics tinkering, so to get used to it I’m going to build a 4x4x4 led cube powered by the Arduino. There are some really handy Instructables and some good youtube videos (see below) which show off similar projects. I’ll upload more details and pics/videos of my project once I’ve gotten started.