The Cowboys Are Working Overtime

On my Christmas list this year, I included an Arduino Starter kit. Luckily, Steve came through for me. The Arduino home page says  

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators.  

Some of the projects described on their website are a window blind that opens and closes automatically based on the sunlight hitting it, a car alarm system that sends you a message when your car door is opened, (for Mike) a turn signal biking jacket, and a self-balancing Segway-like robot. It's all about the sensors you hook up and the instructions you give in the programming.  
        
Open source means that everything is out there for you to use and adapt as you want.  You can download the software for free and launch it on the Arduino. The bluish thing on the right is the Arduino. 

You hook it up to your computer through a USB port and you are off and running. I walked through the introduction, which described what all these parts that came with the starter kit do.   

Mostly, they are lights and sensors and wires to connect everything. Now here is where the problem starts. I am not at all comfortable with the electronics side of this. Even though I don't know the programming language that is used, I do get programming and can follow a program to see what it does. I learned Fortran in college, mastered Basic while teaching math to write programs for computers and graphing calculators, and did a little Python in the last four years just because it looked interesting. But I still assume there are little cowboys in the wires driving those electrons along the trail to make electricity. And when the tutorial says it doesn't matter if I put the resistor before or after the blinking light, I don't get it. I understand plumbing, and plumbing doesn't work like that. So I am going to have to e-mail Steve a lot when I don't get the electronics part. (He's an electronics engineering trained person.)  

On the plus side, I hooked up the computer, downloaded the software for the first tutorial (Blinking Light) and got the light to blink just like it said it would. I even modified the program to change how long the light stayed on and stayed off. So I have made a good start. Next up is Arduino Tutorial 2: LED Lights and Resistors. Ah, those pesky resistors. By next Christmas, I hope to have some operating robots to show off.  If I put bar codes on the presents, the robots could decide who gets each present and deliver them around the living room. That would put Mike out of a job, but it would be really cool.