Junk Box Arduino ─ Ten Projects in Upcycled Electronics

Nobody likes to throw old electronics away. They might be good for something. With an Arduino and this book, they are. You can use that old junk for hours of entertainment, and learn computer technology more deeply along the way. Use your existing Arduino to build the Cestino (Arduino compatible) board and use it for nine other electronics projects, from a logic probe to a microprocessor explorer, and learn some advanced, old-school techniques along the way.

You'll definitely come away with a new, powerful Cestino (it means recycle bin) Arduino-compatible that you'll put together on your breadboard, where you can get at all of its guts. The Cestino build is one of the projects in this book, and is meant to give a common environment for the rest of the projects, which all work with an official Arduino with sufficient pins, such as the Mega 2560. Port and pin assignments will be different. The Cestino can be built using nearly any Arduino, or with a dedicated EPROM/EEPROM burner capable of programming 40 pin DIP Atmel ATmega1284.

Bonus materials include extensions to the Cestino, Sourceforge links for updated code, and all the source-code for the projects.

This book is the ultimate have-fun-while-challenging-your-skills guide for the hundreds of thousands of creative-minded Arduino hackers, every one of them tinkerers, artists, engineers, students, children and adults.

James Strickland has been using computers since the days of the Commodore 64 and the IBM PC XT. He spent most of his undergraduate, graduate, and professional careers in technical support and system administration, explaining computers to other people. He's used Unix-like OSs in various incarnations from Ultrix32 in the early 1990s to Slackware Linux in the mid '90s to OS X, Raspbian, and Xubuntu today, as well as non-Unix-like OSes such as MS-DOS, Windows, Macintosh System 7, CP/M-80, and so on. He got his first Arduino clone (A Boarduino kit from Adafruit Industries) in 2010. Soldering that little board together was his very first success in digital electronics below the "Insert board, load driver" level. He's also known for his Post-Cyberpunk novels Looking Glass and Irreconcilable Differences, and for his novella On Gossamer Wings.