Driving with an Arduino? Keep the lane!

Abstract

Arduino is a popular and very useful tool in STEM and physics education. Teacher demonstrations, laboratory and home work of students are supported by an incredibly wide range of application examples for a very low cost. Since the heart of the Arduino board is an industrial microcontroller, it is a good chance to teach the basics of the related rules, standards and engineering-like approach of application that is essential in high quality STEM education. We discuss here the output drive capability often misinterpreted in the Arduino community and we also draw the attention to the importance of developing the right attitude.

Phonocardiography and Photoplethysmography With Simple Arduino Setups to Support Interdisciplinary STEM Education

“…In the following we draw the attention to some important problems that are typically overlooked. Electronic and mechanical components have absolute maximum ratings that must not be exceeded in any case, otherwise they can be damaged or what is even worse, they can become unreliable [6]. One often hears that users of Arduino, Raspberry Pi or other common devices complain about damaged input/output ports.…”

“…Students are rarely able to find the reasons of such problems due to the lack of in-depth knowledge and understanding, therefore they often try to find a case with reckless trials when it seems to work. This is one example of the worst attitudes that can be developed [6], [43].…”

“…In the example programs we have shown that the nominal sample rate is 200 Hz, so according to the sampling theorem the highest signal frequency must be less than half of this. Substituting the values into Eq (2) gives This is worse than the resolution of a 6-bit ADC, 1/2 6 , so 4 bits of the 10-bit ADC of the Arduino Uno can become useless. This means that the maximum error caused by the aperture jitter is about 23 times higher than the resolution of the ADC.…”

“…It is also important to note that due to the very large and heterogeneous community there is a large proportion of virtually working but professionally inadequate solutions, misleading descriptions. Even engineering sites may present technically questionable solutions, mainly due to the lack of carefulness during employing commonly used techniques [6], [7].…”

Interdisciplinary Technical Exercises for Informatics Teacher Students

“…The experiment can be realized in other systems including charging a capacitor to a certain level via a resistor. In this case only a capacitor and a resistor is required provided that the resistor value is high enough to limit the charging current to a safe level [22]. We have experienced that one problem was to implement the hysteresis properly, and it was even harder to understand why the signal can be out of the levels for a short time and shown in Figure 10.…”