Back to School Wishlist - featuring Arduino and Raspberry Pi!

I can remember one of my early days of Arduino projects that I made around 2011. The project was an automatic phone dialer that was capable to call a number automatically on an Arduino button press. I use the most popular Nokia 1100 mobile phone and an Arduino mega for my project. I hacked every button of the phone and connected it with a digital pin of Arduino using a transistor so that every button can be pressed from Arduino. Look at the image below.

Over the years I made lots of Arduino projects and I have learned a lot. I publish around 100 open source projects on instactables.com and hackster.io. One of my recent projects using Arduino is PCB Bot that I made using Arduino Nano. This bot can be used as a line follower, obstacle avoider, and remote control robot. 

The project details are available here: https://www.instructables.com/PCB-BOT-Line-Follower-Obstacle-Avoiding-Remote-Con/

Another project using Arduino was the Smart City Environmental Monitoring device that collects all the environmental parameters like temperature, humidity, air quality, air pressure, and noise level and publishes and stores those parameters in the cloud.  

The project details are here: https://www.hackster.io/taifur/solar-powered-environmental-monitoring-kit-b1d03d

Another Arduino project is the Arduino learner's kit that I made for Arduino learners and the kit contains all the necessary components required for Arduino learning. 

Kit detail is available here: https://www.instructables.com/Arduino-Learner-Kit/

When I teach Arduino programming I missed one shield that will contain all the usual sensors and components. It can have a few LEDs, several buttons, one POT, one LDR, one LM35 temperature sensor, one RGB led one seven-segment display, one buzzer, one OLED, one RTC, and one MPU (MEMS) sensor. That will help Arduino learners to learn Arduino without buying lots of separate stuff. The shield name can be Arduino Learner shield or something like that. 

Starting out i just did the basics, blink and such, i found a site that has a lost in space series I'm about halfway through  i see a couple robots in the list but I'd love to see more options in robotics, battle bots, mini droids, things that i could show kids thatd get them pumped to learn how 

Haven't gotten started yet. I want to try making a lights and sounds mod for my Star Trek Attack Wing oversized Borg Cube. It's over a foot tall on its stand and would look and sound amazing!

Haven't gotten started yet. I want to try making a lights and sounds mod for my Star Trek Attack Wing oversized Borg Cube. It's over a foot tall on its stand and would look and sound amazing!

• I don't have an Arduino yet but i have many plans on what Arduino project to create. I always dream of having one but I'm financially overwhelmed by our school fees. I also start reading on the basic function of each parts of the arduino (thanks for your website I learned many things about it) and also read the basic codes of it. If I will be given a chance to have one (Arduino starter Kit), I am willing to learn and start making experiment/projects, and also teach my co-student about it.

My first project for an addition was a full self watering garden. I ran it on a arduino mega, and it included 10 moisture sensors and solenoid valves. I am still learning arduino and I am getting into raspberry pi programming, so extra components would be great. One thing that might be cool to include is maybe a small ecg kit

No going back to school I have an idea.

My hobby is Astrophotography so I'm motorizing my telescope mount to make it self drive, make corections to any unwanted move (guiding) and be accessible through WiFi from my phone.

It's gonna be a small IoT base, with automatic gps detection and RTC giving me full knowledge in which celestial coordinates my scope is looking. It will come in three parts:

Raspberry + Motor driver Module + remote

Raspberry will comunicate with driver through cable, and remote will be wifi based, just to be able to make couple of actions (Translation, parking, joystick move, gps, Humidity&temperature), It's gonna have an LCD Display, Joystick and couple of buttons.

Im gonna control Raspberry from my phone through WiFi remote desktop. It will be conected to motor drives on the telescope mount, sending corections data. I'm also making custom pcb's in KiCad and sending them off to JLCPCB to print. 

2/3 of my project are done, only Part missing is Raspberry Pi 4B 4/8GB to make an Linux based guiding correcions:( Those are imposible to get anywhere.. 

My first electronics/embedded project was back in 2014, when I was 17: a simple 2-wheeled robot using 3 HC-SR04 ultrasound sensors, controlled by a PIC32 on a Arduino-like board (Pinguino) but since I was really bad at electronics all it did was turning round and round...

I left school at 13 and started programming shortly after, electronics was very obscure to me andd I never had the chance to be able to ask teachers or classmate for help, got back to pure software because I didn't get it and couldn't find meaningful help on the internet, at that time...

Fast-forward 8 years later and I'm starting to learn electronics again and just learned that the pulseIn() method cannot be called multiple times on different pins so I dug up the project and decided to write a new implementation of the function in pure C that would take an array of pins and give back an array of distances... and I think I'll make the code run on a microprocessor without a board like Arduino, so that I learn more about bare-metal programming and can practice with electronics... (Also, C is my first language and I really love it ).

There's some bits of the code on my GitHub (ZyriabDsgn) but it's more like testing code, I'm planning on doing videos about all that and my journey on embedded programming, electronics and that kind of fun stuff... but I can't afford even a Uno at the moment so that'll wait a bit :/

On the other recent projects I just finished building a WiFi repeater using a ESP8266 board today but it's quite slow and I'll have to take a look into the firmware (made by martin-ger on GH), see if I can send a PR to optimize something... or just rewrite the basics of the repeating part of the firmware if I have the courage 

If I could win the prize I would definitely use the Raspberry Pi on my modernization project for my 2010 Subaru, replacing the buggy internal computer and I would finally own an Arduino Uno! :D Also lots of projects in robotics, smart surveillance (in C++ using OpenCV) and make cool videos where I learn and share my experiments 

Also we're ewpecting our first baby in February and would love to be able to help the mama with my new skills 

I don't have a lot of pictures but here is the WiFi repeater on its EVB: 

• Thanks for reading and have a great day 

Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense is a fantastic tool to start studying IoT. It is an evolution of the traditional Arduino Nano, but, compared to the classic Arduino UNO, it features a much more powerful processor and a much larger program memory and a RAM is 128 times larger. It also includes other great features like Bluetooth and an impressive selection of sensors.

There is the ability to run Edge Computing (AI) applications on it using TinyML and you can create your own machine learning models using TensorFlow Lite and upload them to your board using the Arduino IDE. It's really simple to create an AI application with Edge Impulse using the microphone or the IMU. It is really cool! 

Dabbling with Raspberry Pi’s came before Arduino’s but dabbling with Arduino’s came because of dabbling with Pi’s.

May 2016 was my introduction to the Pi’s. I had purchased Globalscale Technologies SheevaPlug development kit to explore single board computers. Working for an ISP, our competitors were saying our DNS had the slowest response time. I wanted to unleash a herd of Plug computers into the network to call home providing real time statics from the far reaches of the network.

My motivation to invest more time in the Plug herd proposal fizzled out after a successful proof of concept. Overcoming the bureaucracy to even get the project in the running for funding was daunting. A few of my coworkers had purchased Pi’s and were playing in the space. I joined a group buy of a Pi2.

I have always made it a practice of making a big boy toy purchase at Christmas for myself, so I could have a present under the tree that I knew I would want to play on Christmas morning. I bought an Adafruit Ultimate Global Positioning System (GPS) HAT for Raspberry Pi. GPS was an area I had explored when my career focused on aviation electronics some ten years back.

I fell in love with the Pi HAT. The GPS stuff I had only read about in aviation publication was at my fingertips. The configuration of the Pi extended the system administration I focused my career on. I was investing in Linux while many were seeking the Microsoft certificates. Linux enabled me to get down and dirty to understand how operating systems actually worked.

I dd command line many images in those early days of Pi’s. I pitched a proposal to a UK magazine on the Pi GPS receiver. My aviation background gave me insight into the technology. They accepted the proposal and they published it in LinuxFormat magazine in August 2016. And you thought I was making all this stuff up:)

Pi’s dabbling lead to Arduino’s pursuits through model railroad animation projects. I had used a Pi and a small screen to construct a HO scale model railroad drive-in movie theatre. I had done some other small animation projects like lights flashing and a 12ft thunder and lighting cloud with sound and lighting flashes. The Pi was over kill for smaller one of a kind animations.

Flashing a LED using an Arduino Nano to simulate an Arc Welder, complete with a plastic figure holding a small piece of fibre-optic strand to conduct the light onto the workbench. Some of the animation projects have been presented to the E14 Community in projects or contest entries.

At last count, the animation on the model railroad layout has over 42 Arduino Nano’s, two Arduino Mega’s and eight Raspberry Pi’s. In addition, there is a Pi and a few Nano animations that travel to road shows. The railroad animation project started in the summer of 2017 and continues to this day.

Missing from the parts list I feel is important would be a bread board power supply. Best practice suggests to not use the device power for external devices. I have learned, sometimes by generating smoke, you need an alternate DC power source other than what is provided on the device.