Arduino Internals (Technology in Action)

Got your Arduino and want to know more about it? Dale does a good job explaining it here.Dale Wheat writes a lot of stuff for Steve Circia's Circuit Cellar magazine. It puzzles me how Dale not only learns so much about this, and also has time to write about it.... but somehow he does. I am quite pleased with his efforts in collecting all sorts of info on how Arduino works, what's available, and how to make it work.Of course, you could google it yourself, but here is a good sized book of it that's a lot easier to read while sitting in the recliner. Thinking about implementing Arduino? A good review of this will give you a good idea what Arduino is all about.Its not nearly as arcane as most technical books I have seen... this one gets down to the nuts and bolts of quickly implementing Arduino in a product - what you need and what you don't if you are thinking of making thousands of items instead of making a hobby project. You will soon discover Arduino is more of a concept and framework, more than just a board.The book shows you how the off the shelf boards you can buy are just your training wheels. Where you go from there is all up to you. You can leverage the work of thousands of people behind your ideas, along with contributing a few of your own.I will update this review when I launch my line of products based on Arduino. This book helped a lot in the design of them.The other book I like a lot is: Arduino Cookbook

My main complaint about this book is its very sparse index. My second complaint is that is silent on many important "internal" Arduino topics. For example: #include. This is a very important high level directive in many Arduino sketches. You will not find "include" or "#include" anywhere in the index, or for that matter in the Table of Contents. Likewise for closely related topics of dot-H files, header files, library - not a single instance of these terms in the index or ToC. I found a singular mention of #include on Page 27. It is exactly that: a mention. The meaning of this directive, its use and syntax are given but one sentence in this 358 page, very expensive, book. Technical books like this live and die by the completeness of their indexes. A reference book like this looses 90% of its usefulness if the reader cannot find the specific topic he seeks.As other reviewers have mentioned this book diverges from its intended topic (internals) to may off-subject external topics. I found Chapter 9 ( Project Management ) particularly out of place in a book whose title implies a detailed description of the nuts and bolts of the Arduino system.

This is a great book for those who already have a good bit of experience either with the Arduino itself or programming and hardware in general. It is pretty evenly split in covering hardware and software topics. It doesn't quite make it down to assembly programming, but it does dig into how some of the core Arduino library functions work and explains how to do some good optimization of your code. It heavily covers directly programming registries, which is a good way to cut code size, but if you don't have a good memory for this sort of thing, you'll want to have some reference for the ATMega chip registries handy. It also does a good job covering interrupts which are very handy! It also covers the bare minimum needed to make your own Arduino compatible system and how to program it with or without a bootloader installed. Overall it's a good book for someone getting into more advanced projects with microcontrollers.

Topics are intermingled and many topics, important and not-so-important, are not covered in sufficient detail to be of use:Assembly language and the Atmel328P architecture - in the context of this text - are two not-so-important topics. The typical reader will not be programming in assembly and will not be interested in the pros and cons of RISC vs. CISC processors (or of Harvard vs. von Neumann architectures). The space could be much better utilized to extract and explain selected topics from the avr-libc user manual and to show the reader how to use the avr tools buried in the Arduino package.And, although some space is given to using both Arduino libraries and avr-c code to control the serial port interface, none is given to a discussion of the important SPI and TWI communications interfaces used by many Arduino shields.Interrupts and interrupt service routines also should be receive more attention.Some examples using readily available Arduino shields also would add significant value to the book.

Well written, loving the detail and the in-depth look into the AVR hardware and the Arduino software.The best Arduino book I have read and I have read a few - highly recommended!This book explains in detail of the workings of the Arduino hardware as well as and the underlying "hidden" C calls the Arduino software calls to run a script. It is well explained, suitable for a beginner however, depending on how green you are may be a little heavy but well worth the struggle. I am relatively new to Arduino and AVRs in general and wanted a deeper understanding of the environment. This book explains it all! Well worth the read.

This book is great if you want to get into the weeds of the Arduino. I have been trying to get details as to the lower level hardware side of programming the controller, and this book covers the material quite well. For example, this is one of the first publications that I have found that specifically deals with interupts on the Arduino. If you have some history in programming, and have programmed at a hardware level before, this would be an excellent book for you to consider. It is an excellent resource.Highly recommended

Firstly, I have to say I keep coming back to this book - if only the index was any good. The nugget of information I return to are some of the macros (e.g. bitSet etc) which are useful. The index has no Macro entry; why not? Where is the page with the interrupt vectors listed - believe it or not I only has 2 entries IR proximity sensors and Internet neither of which is 'internal' to the Arduino. So inside the front page of my copy there is a growing list of quick page look-ups.The book is useful for having short program listings so you can quickly establish a base camp (e.g. using Timer1 to blink a LED using the faster data direction register commands) before you then adapt/expand for own use.Because the nitty-grity information is so difficult to find and the index such a waste of space I am tempted to give 3 stars (It's OK) but since I return to it 4 stars is fair. If the index was excellent [full macros listing, pointers to ISR tables, pointers to PORT to Arduino pin tables] then the book would get 5 stars. But there are NO top line entries for PORTS, TIMERS, ADC, or ISRs yet this book is about Internals!Why does Eagle have a headline and sub heading entries?

Good book for taking your knowledge of Arduino programming beyond the beginner stage

Written in a very easily read and understandable style. Contains a wealth of information in one place and will be used for reference on my work bench. An excellent companion to " The Arduino Cookbook" .

Pour connaître l'intérieur de l'Arduino, c'est le mieux que j'ai pu trouver. Un léger regret, ce livre revient parfois plusieurs fois sur les mêmes sujets, pour approfondir, ce qui rend moins facile la possibilité de retrouver les nombreuses astuces indiquées. Pour plus de détail (ou directement, pour les connaisseurs), lire les datasheets sur le site d'Atmel.