This time the suggestion came from my wife: She came across Arduino systems in the school she’s been teaching, and suggested that I and our 10-year-old tackle Arduino-related projects. I ordered an Arduino starter kit that’s based on Arduino Uno microcontroller board and we took our first steps towards building cyber-physical systems.

The starter kit seems self-contained and the book is very informative. It would be good if there were Dutch translation, too, but so far it’s good enough for our practical goals. We’ve tried the first example, and as a time-honored tradition uploaded our first program that blinks an embedded LED light, changing the duration and experimenting with it. Step 1, Arduino version of “Hello, world!” accomplished! 🙂

I guess it will be a bit challenging for me to explain Ohm’s law and some of the electronic components. On top of that, I’ll have to explain him the basics of Arduino (C++) language. Having a lot of example projects in the book that came with the starter kit, in addition to lots of examples that’s part of freely available Arduino IDE will definitely help in that regard. I can imagine that there will be some confusion because of his previous exposure to Python, but we’ll see how it goes.

As 2021 comes to an end, I’m looking forward to teaching more about programming and electronics to my sons in 2022.