So last year I ordered two simple soldering kits from wish, one is a “police” flasher the I accidentally destroyed after completing it (and it worked for a bit lol) the other is a 1-10 random number wheel thingy.
I ordered three more last night a little car that follows a line, a metal detector and a tiny fm radio to put together because I think it’s fun and relaxing, so here is my question, does anyone have any suggestions for other little kits that I could build like these preferably cheap ones lol.
Also what can I do with an arduino nano? I was fiber one the other day and not sure what to do with it.
Nano’s are good fun, but not so much on their own… maybe get one of those arduino module kits with servos/sensors/leds/etc. With that the nano will actually be able to do something.
Like what FManga says, a module kit is definitely the way to go. I’ve been looking to potentially pick up another one with more sensors etc… that I don’t already have in my kit right now (which came with a Mega 2650).
I’ve always wanted to create a floating RGB LED light for the bath that detects the temperature and changes colour from blue to red depending on how hot the water is.
I started playing with the Nano this evening, it has some built in sketches with annotation telling what everything does, and I was able to make it blink its onboard green LED at a speed I set and then hook up an external LED to pin 9 and make it fade in and out as I wanted and I even hooked up a small fan I have for a Pi and it would turn it on and off, could be neat as a way to cool a case with a temp sensor,
I wonder if annotated code for pokitto would make it easier for me to learn how to do that, though Im in no way programming the arduino, it would be neat to make something useful with it,
Not yet but I will, I just meant a game with the code explained within, though a tutorial written for dummies like me would help too. Too many game ideas and no way to make them.
I have written something a bit like this once for Arduboy:
It’s not actually a full game, and I developed it over time in response to a series of questions being asked by a particular forum user:
However, I hasten to point out two important things:
Firstly, without the corresponding thread, a lot of the context and the explanation is lost.
Secondly, even with all the comments I added, the comments explain what the code does, but not how it does it, you’d still need at least a basic grasp of C++ to be able to modify it in any meaningful way.
The fact of the matter is that it’s nearly impossible to teach programming just through comments on a program.
Comments can give you the general idea of what’s going on,
but to actually understand what each line means you really need to learn the language,
otherwise you miss out on the important theory like what functions and classes are and why they’re needed.
Programming isn’t just a matter of typing commands and having the computer do your bidding, there’s a lot of theory involved.
It’s definitely not easy, anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or some kind of genius,
but it’s also very rewarding, and it’s the difficulty that makes it rewarding.
This article probably sums it up better than I could:
It’s a mental challenge, like a Zelda puzzle but on a slightly larger scale and more grounded in reality.
It’s often said that a programmer’s job isn’t telling computers what to do, it’s solving problems.
(Search ‘programmers problem solvers’ in your favourite search engine and see what results you get.)
That article is one of the many useful resources collated in my “Resource Collection”:
Lastly I’d like to point out that if anyone’s interested I could actually port this platformer demo to Pokitto with relatively minimal effort, though the resolution difference would be a bit of an issue, and I’d have to either ask for permission to reuse or modify the game assets since they aren’t technically mine or ask someone to donate some (I probably could come up with my own, but it would mean a longer delay before the demo is release, and it would probably look worse than a ZX spectrum game).
Edit:
The problem is that tutorials are hard to write.
It’s hard to know where to start, and how to word things,
and there’s a lot of interlinked/interdependent knowledge.
E.g. to understand the restrictions on the numbers that a given datatype can hold,
you have to understand binary and how computers actually store the numbers.
I find a lot of people tend to get bored with that kind of theory very quickly,
and they tend to want to rush straight into the ‘fun’ stuff like making characters dance across the screen.
(But you have to eat your vegetables before you’re allowed dessert.)
You could team up with someone.
You need to have a concrete plan though,
if you start making a game with only half an idea things get messy quite quickly.
E.g. Some of the design work I did for a Minesweeper game:
Went to target tonight and found a marked down pi 3b, it’s installing it’s is on a 16 gig card atm, and I think I have retro pie on an 8gig card as well.
Add, the noobs card installed then got to 100% and restarted, the retropie one works but as usual I cannot figure out how to add cores to it like how it’s been every time I’ve set up retroarch lol
that sounds like an awesome starter project.