It seems everyone wants to forget this long pandemic summer like that face mask you left on the kitchen counter right before going for a much-needed grocery run. Well, not everyone. This year’s break had no in-person summer camps, or awkward school orientations. The long, hot summer days spent consuming intellectually deprived movies and nutritionally impoverished yet fat-laden snacks seem to last forever.

How to make the summer better? Two words: Arduino Camp. The most fun you can have programming using C language to send 0.7v to a light-emitting diode (LED) making it blink. The only time my parental units tolerated me being a C student.

According to the Arduino website, Arduino is an open-source electronics platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software. It works with various electronic components such as photoresistors, fan blades, servo, and stepper motors, motion sensors and so much more. There is a multitude of projects that can be made with Arduino. One group in the camp designed a randomizer that when a button is pressed, a random LED lights up. Another student had engineered a “Sibling Alarm” project where a buzzer rings when a sensor detects motion. Arduino projects can be very simple like these or complex such as autonomous robots.

Learning Arduino was time well spent during the COVID summer. If you’re interested in this and want to learn more, check out the links below for websites and other resources about Arduino. In the meantime, I know I’ll be working on having Arduino to send me an email and text notification when a sensor detects every time my male parental unit opens the fridge to pilfer my cache of frozen food from my two best friends Ben and Jerry.

Related Articles:

https://www.arduino.cc/

https://youtu.be/6cRFf4qkcTw

https://tsaweb.org/competitions-programs/tsa/computer-science