The Pole Vaulter

    I aim to make some blog posts and accompanying videos to present some intermediate level concepts for micro-controller hobbyists.

    There are lots of resources online for beginners.  I learned starting with the Adafruit Arduino Lessons and I have heard good things about the Paul McWhorter Youtube series, to name a few. The Arduino forum, Stack Exchange and Reddit forums are good resources for asking questions.  However, I see some questions come up over and over, so I hope to help address them.

    I've adopted a philosophy toward the projects I am presenting because of one problem in particular that I see on the Arduino Reddit, the Pole Vaulter. The Pole Vaulter has gotten it into their head that 1. a thing called Arduino exists and 2. it can't be that hard.  Armed with this knowledge and unwarranted confidence, the Pole Vaulter grabs their pole (i.e. someone else's project that has been posted online), attempts to vault (recreate that project) and is quickly confronted with their own inadequacies ("Why doesn't it work?!?").

As a reasonable person would not expect to grab a pole and succeed at pole vaulting on their first try, a novice should not attempt to build someone else's project without first learning the fundamentals.

    Because pole vaulters exist, I have specifically made projects that illustrate the lesson of the day but that are not useful for any practical purpose.  My aim is that a pole vaulter might look at what is presented in these projects and find them boring, just a bit of blinking lights and turning knobs.  This would hopefully spare me from having to lecture them on the importance of a solid foundation.  

    By contrast, the Arduinist that has taken time to work through the beginner lessons, hopefully would have, at some point, realized that if they can light a light they can do a little code swapping and make a motor move, turn on a camera, send a bit of data to a database or whatever, and if they can trigger those actions from a potentiometer then the same sort of code swapping can be done with a load cell, a PIR sensor, button input or whatever else.  That is, these lessons use LEDs as generic actuators and Potentiometer wiper position as generic sensors. They exist to make a point, and it is on the intermediate micro-controller hobbyist to take example code and put them together to make something for the pole vaulter to spectacularly fail at reproducing.