In article , Peter Percival wrote:
> My apologies for an off-topic post, but there seems to be no Usenet
> group for Arduinos as there is for Raspberry Pis, and I'm confident
> plenty of readers here will have experience of them.

No usenet group ... but your search engine of choice will discover a
lot of other resources.

> My question is, where should one begin with Arduinos?

If you're already doing things with a Raspberry Pi then you probably
already understand how to attach things to GPIO lines, and so on, and
may well have a good stock of components. If that's NOT the case then
you may benefit from one of the many starter kits that come with a
selection of common components to play with ... but if you already know
your way around a Pi then you probably already have the bits ...

.. except that some Arduino devices have to be programmed over a
serial interface, and RS-232 interfaces are quite uncommon on modern
PCs. You should either make sure that you choose an Arduino board that
can be programmed directly from USB, or get a USB-Serial interface or
"FTDI Friend" for programming.

My first "Arduino" board was not an official Arduino, but a "Trinket"
board from Adafruit. The trinket is very small and limited, but also
very cheap and it does have enough USB hardware to allow programming
(though you can't use the USB port as a serial console). The Adafruit
support pages are very well written, and gave all the information I
needed to get started with the hardware and the Arduino development
tools.

--
Cheers,
 Daniel.

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