August 2015

Review of “Exploring Arduino: Tools and Techniques for Engineering Wizardry” by Jeremy Blum. Reviewed on August 24^th, 2015.

I’m coming to review this book rather late. It was published in late 2013, I believe, but I’ve only recently purchased it and wanted to pipe up with my two cents’ worth. As many people can probably say,  I originally encountered the works of Jeremy Blum on YouTube. I bought my first Arduino board in late 2013. Being a busy professional and father, I didn’t have a whole lot of time to play around with it, although I truly did want to play. But I can’t really learn new things in a vacuum, so I quickly developed a project to use my first board on: a timing track for my son’s Boxwood Derby car. (He had a brief interest in the Cub Scouts, which has long since waned.) So searching the Intertubes for training materials on the Arduino was natural. I looked at many of them, but by far the best at least in my opinion, were the short videos produced on the topic by Jeremy Blum with the support of the electronics supply company Element 14. (Note: I have no association with the author or any of the companies mentioned here.)

I used those Arduino Tutorial videos to bring myself up to speed quickly. I actually managed to get a timing circuit built in time for my son to enter his car in an elementary school science fair. True, we only re-proved what Galileo figured out in 1638, but still, it’s always nice to see that the laws of physics haven’t changed. I was very grateful to Mr. Blum for his guidance. At the time, I remember being astonished that such clear, cleanly explained training films existed for the Arduino and that they had been created by an undergraduate engineering student! When he announced that he was writing a book, I sort of felt like I owed it to him to buy and read it. (Plus, he had helped to get me hooked on this whole open-source hardware maker movement, so I was naturally curious to learn more.)

To summarize my perspective on the book, I’m a working IT professional who had introductory practical electronics courses as a Physics student nearly 30 years ago, so many of the concepts here aren’t new to me. I’ve played around with small circuits on my own for many years, but I was never really a hobbyist, more of a dabbler. But with the arrival of the Arduino and the Raspbery Pi, I finally had the opportunity to try out working with microcontrollers. I had always been a bit too busy and perhaps slightly intimidated to take that particular plunge. I think maybe that’s Jeremy’s best trait, he makes you unafraid to try out new things. The other thing I should mention here is that I've worked as a technical writer for many years, so I'm aware of the technical aspects of putting together this kind of hardware/software instructional book. It's a unique kind of challenge to write about both technical hardware and software in a combined work.

So, the book . . . I bought the paperback on Amazon during a month in which Mr. Blum turned out to be donating his profits to young, women engineers. I can certainly get behind that cause and I’m glad it worked out that way. The book, printed by Wiley is nicely printed. I like the texture and design of the cover. The pages are fairly standard for technology/programming books, black and white on a medium-light weight, matte stock. The layout of chapters are clean and crisp; the typography clear and legible and the illustrations printed well in greyscale. The illustrations are basically an even mixture of screen grabs of the Arduino IDE interface, what looks to be Mac OS X operating system windows and elements, circuit diagrams done in Fritzing, a few photos likely taken by the author, and a few black and white diagrams of key concepts.

The structure follows the YouTube tutorial videos pretty closely, introducing elementary engineering principles first and then moving on to the basics of how a microcontroller works, the practical capabilities of an Arduino, and then simple and more complex projects created with one. Usually, the author sticks with the Arduino Uno, but he does acknowledge and occasionally even suggest projects for the other models. He starts each chapter calling out the digital resources available related to the material in the chapter, which is nice. He naturally links back to his tutorial videos, but he isn’t shy pointing to other valuable online resources. All of the sketches, diagrams and schematic files he uses are available on a custom website supporting the book. (www.exploringarduino.com)

I've recently taken up the hobby/game/interest/waste-of-time/pursuit(?) of geocaching. So how did this happen? Yet another thing to occupy my already endangered spare time? In hindsight, it seems only natural. It involves technology, being out in the woods, conservationism, exploration, and a childlike sense of wonder. What's truly a wonder is that I didn't stumble into this sooner.  But in my case, it took a nudge from my son and a conversation with my wife to get me off my duff to try it. My son got a treasure map from one of his friend. His father had given him a treasure map a couple of years ago, which led him to a treasure box on their property that was just chock full of gems and doubloons. Liam and his cousin were bouncing off the walls one Saturday about this map, because, you see, the map was BIGGER than just his friend's yard. It also showed areas all the way down to Florida . . and there were other treasures on it! We just about had to tackle them as they were headed out to hitchhike to the Sunshine State. (Not really, they're nine. But I wouldn't have put it past them if they had gotten any more worked up about that map.)

My wife and I were talking about how fun it was to see Liam and Aidan so excited. I said something about how there's nothing better in the world than that sense of wonder you have as a child. And then my wife said those fateful words, "You know, we could take them geocaching or something, so they can at least find something."  One of our former neighbors had been into this hippy-thing called 'geocaching' and was always going on and on about it. That came to mind, so I looked into it. And a giant, bemusing, out-of-control slippery slope opened up under me and down I went . . . like Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in 'Romancing the Stone'.

What is geocaching? Basically, it's a glorified global scavenger hunt, using any GPS-enabled device to guide you. It was started about fifteen years ago by a couple of people in Oregon (naturally) who were into GPS and exploring the natural world. It has now evolved into a global passion followed by millions of people in search of more than 2.6 million individual secret stashes of stuff. Mostly the stuff doesn't matter, it's the hunt that matters. The game is to log into one of the two or three cache tracking websites, find one in the area where you will be travelling, use your iPhone or Garmen to track it down, FIND IT (not always a simple taask), open it, trade stuff for stuff, sign the logbook, put it back where you found it (hopefully hidden even better than when you found it), and finally log your find online. To get the most out of it, you have to pick one of the geocaching communities. There is an Open Caching site and movement, mostly pushed by the GPS maker Garmin, which is sort of like the wild west of geocaching. But 99% of all geocachers use the ones that started it all: Geocaching.com, which is run out of Portland, Oregon by several of the originators of the activity, with their company Groundspeak, Inc. But all of the things you need are at Geocaching.com.

I'm just a baby at this. My score is only 6. That means I've located 6 geocaches, all in my local area, all within the last two weeks. There seem to be thousands in the Atlanta area alone. Heck, I found one less than 1000 feet from our house, and another less than 500 feet from my office. The fun of it is that once you get within about 50 feet of a cache, GPS isn't going to help you much. It isn't that precise . . . and frankly, lots of the people who create these caches are just evil. They go out of their way to make it hard to find them. (Don't get me wrong, most of them aren't that hard. Many of them are obvious once you get nearby. It depends on what the cacher is going for . . . a tricky, clever hide, or just to get you to a beautiful spot out in nature.)

Last Sunday, I conned all five boys, our two plus their three cousins, to walk down our street and across Riverside Drive where there is a big wooded 'park'. It's sort of attached to the Roswell Community park system, but not really. It's just a low lying area near the Chattahoochie River. They looked like the cast of Stand By Me. And we went hunting for three geocaches I found on the Geocaching iPhone app. We found two, couldn't find the other. The last one was truly out in the woods, and it was getting kind of late, and the boys were freaking out because . . .well, there's lots of spiders in the woods in Georgia. hee hee hee.

But finding them, especially when their hiding spot is tricky or clever, is just a joy to experience. It's especially fun to see kids come upon a location and run around looking for the cache. And then when you open the cache, you get to see them pour over the contents. Usually, as long as it hasn't been muggled, there a logbook, a pen that probably doesn't work (take your own at all times, that seems to be the rule), some swag, maybe a couple of geotagged items, and very rarely, some real treasure.

I've finally publicly posted the page for my three home cameras. I put them out here mostly for my own amusement, and also as a way to share what I'm working on and what the weather is in my parts with members of my extended family. I've currently got three cameras:

• a shop camera
• a camera pointed out the back window of my shop at the woods behind our house
• a camera aimed out our front window at our sidewalk and yard

Honestly,  this is mostly an excuse to play around with webcams, home security software, and the ins-and-outs of my home wifi network.  It's been an education . . . to which I will soon subject my boys.  (evil laugh)

I'm sorry, but learning routing, IP networking standards, and how to deal with wifi devices is just going to be a right-of-passage for children of this coming generation . . . just like when kids had to learn how to milk a cow by hand and fix an internal combustion engine back in the hazy days of the mid-20th century. 

My shop cam page can be found here.