You're reading from Practical Arduino Robotics A hands-on guide to bringing your robotics ideas to life using Arduino

Product type Paperback

Published in Mar 2023

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781804613177

Length 334 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Tools

Arduino

Concepts

Robotics

Author (1):

Lukas Kaul

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Table of Contents (21) Chapters

Preface

1. Part 1: Selecting the Right Components for Your Robots

2. Chapter 1: Introducing Robotics and the Arduino Ecosystem FREE CHAPTER

3. Chapter 2: Making Robots Perceive the World with Sensors

4. Chapter 3: Making Your Robot Move and Interact with the World with Actuators

5. Chapter 4: Selecting the Right Arduino Board for Your Project

6. Part 2: Writing Effective and Reliable Robot Programs for Arduino

7. Chapter 5: Getting Started with Robot Programming

8. Chapter 6: Understanding Object-Oriented Programming and Creating Arduino Libraries

9. Chapter 7: Testing and Debugging with the Arduino IDE

10. Part 3: Building the Hardware, Electronics, and UI of Your Robot

11. Chapter 8: Exploring Mechanical Design and the 3D Printing Toolchain

12. Chapter 9: Designing the Power System of Your Robot

13. Chapter 10: Working with Displays, LEDs, and Sound

14. Chapter 11: Adding Wireless Interfaces to Your Robot

15. Part 4: Advanced Example Projects to Put Your Robotic Skills into Action

16. Chapter 12: Building an Advanced Line-Following Robot Using a Camera

17. Chapter 13: Building a Self-Balancing, Radio-Controlled Telepresence Robot

18. Chapter 14: Wrapping Up, Next Steps, and a Look Ahead

19. Index

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Using the Arduino IDE for testing and debugging

There are several methods of testing the modules of your robot program. If you write a piece of code that can make an LED blink with variable frequency, you can create the desired frequency with a potentiometer and use an LED to see if the blinker code is reacting correctly to the input signal. However, the Arduino IDE provides us with two additional powerful tools for testing and debugging: the Serial Monitor and the Serial Plotter. Although we have used them in previous chapters already, let us take a deeper dive into both and learn how we can use them as very effective tools in our development process.

Using the Serial Monitor as input

The Arduino IDE’s Serial Monitor is a character-based interface to send and receive data to and from a connected Arduino via its Serial interface. So far, we have only used it to receive and display data to show the output of the program that runs on your Arduino. But it can also be used...