Purpose:

Through this term we have been slowly building skills with using the Arduino as a tool for gathering data. As you may have noticed the Arduino can also be used to control various objects and output devices. Fortunately (or unfortunately) the possibilities are endless. This lab asks you to use your developing skills to assess a possible project of interest to you. This lab is entirely a research project with no expectation that you implement the project you find. You may have time over the summer but most of the projects are much more substantial than what we have been addressing in our introductory labs.

Procedure:

For this lab you will need your curiousity and network access.

i) The Hackaday community is one that many of you are aware of. Many of the projects documented on Hackaday use Arduino's or some other microcontroller. As of the time of writing this lab there are over 2500 projects that use the Arduino in some way. Go to the Arduino hack page and spend some time looking back through the various projects linked there.

Once you have found a project that seems intriguing to you follow it's links and see what information and guidance is actually available.

ii) Does the article have links to actual build instructions? Many of the Hackaday projects also have links to related projects. Sometimes there are links out to webpages or github accounts that document the build and sometimes there are not. What is your assessment of the level of guidance that is available if you were to decide to recreate the project you are assessing?

iii) Can you find a complete parts list for the hardware for the project? Does this parts list include any difficult to access materials or items? Is the a general sense of the parts budget for this project? What is that budget? How long might it take you to assemble the materials for the project?

iv) Circuit Boards: Many of the projects on Hackaday use custom circuit boards that are designed and then fabricated in China usually. This is not particularly expensive but it does require an additional skill set to design create the PCB (printed circuit board). In many cases the project creator has extra boards that they will sell to interested parties. Is this the case for your project?

v) Software: What are the software requirements for the project? Is the Arduino sketch for running the project available? Does the sketch require custom libraries? When you look at the sketch do you understand most of the code or relatively little?

vi) Comments: The comments section for Hackaday projects can be very revealing and interesting. They can also be snarky and unsupportive though this is less common. What did you learn from the comments about the project?

LAB DELIVERABLES:

I) In a Jupyter notebook provide links and responses to each of the prompts for this lab.