Node.js and Arduino: Building the Nodeuino example

July 08, 2012

I’ve wanted to start building robots with an Arduino for years. I’ve had several fits and starts - building the examples in the Getting Started with Arduino book, starting to learn basic electronics from Make: Electronics. But I never put enough time into it to get much further.

I even included my electronics kit in the limited space we had moving to Argentina. But it mostly sat on a shelf and got dusty.

Until I started seeing all the buzz around Node.js and Arduino - nodeuino, node.js-powered robots at nodeconf, Rick Waldron’s awesome johnny-five project… and realized I’m way too late to the party and need to get moving.

So I made it my weekend project yesterday, and built the walkLED example in the Nodeuino documentation. It uses 6 LEDs and 2 switches, I only have 4 LEDs and 1 switch that doesn’t fit on a breadboard, so I simplified it. Here’s a little video showing it working. It pans from the circuit diagram in the nodeuino docs, to the circuit in the Fritzing circuit-diagramming app, to my circuit built on the breadboard, to the terminal showing the node.js app, to the speed being controlled by the potentiometer.

None of this is original yet - it’s all from the example circuit and code created by Sebastian Müller (github.com/semu). My task now is to understand that code and build on it. Then I want to build a circuit that reads some public Twitter feed and shows the number of new tweets on a digital LCD display.