Arduino

The book I read to research this post was Arduino For Dummies by John Nussey which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. The Arduino is a little like the Raspberry Pi and there are 2 major components that combine to make it. There is a circuit board and components which varies according to what you are trying to build. There is a kind of standard as to what is an arduino component but many companies manufacture these kits and separate components. There is also a programming language and there are many scripts that can be downloaded from the internet often for free and are copied to your arduino product via your computer. There is a massive variety of arduino kits and of course you can design and build your own. Also the Arduino programming language has been much simplified and improved upon since it was first introduced. If you do decide to learn and use the programming language try and find scripts that you can adapt rather than writing a program from scratch. You will save yourself a lot of work. One Japanese company has even developed an arduino kit geiger counter that can be bought for around £110.00 and that was specifically developed for the incident in Japan when there was a tsunami that caused flooding that threatened to cause a disaster at a nuclear power station. With this particular kit you really need to know what you are doing constructing it as it is very Labelsdifficult to build and contains a high voltage. Another kit is an mp3 player that rips music via your computer and plays them back in mp3 format. It's also compatible with a lot of different formats and will work equally well with a Apple Macintosh, Windows or Linux computer. This book contains lots of projects to get you started and has instructions with quite a lot.