A Pi user’s guide to coding the Arduino

The Arduino is a powerful board. It may not have the same processing power as a Raspberry Pi – in fact it cannot even match the original Raspberry Pi – but it has power in its simplicity and connectivity. It has protocols such as I2C, SPI, UART and serial, in addition to digital IO (on/off) and analogue IO.

But why is this important? With an Arduino we can write the code on our computer, in this case a Raspberry Pi, and then flash the code onto the Arduino where it is stored. We can remove the Arduino from the Pi, and as long as we can supply power to the project, it can run quite happily with no screen. With the newer batch of Arduinos we can connect to the internet and networks, send data over said networks and even send data back to the Arduino.

The power of the Arduino is that it can be independent and gather data for you in the field. Sure, the Raspberry Pi can also do this, but why use an entire Linux computer just to gather data when you can run a tiny, power-efficient microcontroller?

In this project we are going to create a simple motor-control project that