After going to the Arduino site to install and test your software and programming connection, this chapter guided you through several programming activities. These example sketches showed you how to make your microcontroller do some common tasks, introduced many programming concepts, and suggested a couple of good habits to develop your computer skills.

Microcontroller Tasks

• Sending messages to a serial monitor for display
• Storing and retrieving values from memory
• Solving math problems
• Making decisions to control program flow
• Counting and controlling repetitions

Programming Concepts

• What a function is, and how to pass a value to a function’s parameter
• What the Arduino’s setup and loop functions do
• The difference between global and local variables
• Declaring and using variable data types, with examples of char, int, and float
• How to solve math problems with arithmetic operators
• How to make decisions with if, if…else, and if…else if
• Using operators in if statements
• How to count and control repetitions with for and while loops

Computer Skills

• What a baud rate is, and how to set it in your sketch and your Serial Monitor
• What ASCII characters are, and what they are used for
• Using your microcontroller’s language reference
• Why documenting code is important, and how to help make your code self-documenting