Introduction
Who should follow this tutorial?
This book is written for people just like you and me. My fascination with Arduino started with a magazine article describing how to build your first robot. A Robot? I was hooked immediately, but I soon found the article lacked depth: follow a series of steps, and voila! - you have created a robot. In reality I'd created a robotic paint-by-numbers and didn't have a clue how or why my creation worked. Some of the principles were pretty complex, and could have been whole projects on their own. So I decided to start from the beginning again, and I began the journey to understand how I had reached my destination (the robot) the first time. This tutorial series is the result.
What makes this tutorial different?
This tutorial differs from many others on robotics, Arduino and microprocessors - primarily in way that the learning takes place. For a start, this isn't a tutorial discussing a number of often-unrelated (but nevertheless very useful) topics. Instead, as we work together through this series, we are heading towards a clear goal - the creation of a sophisticated robot - and gaining knowledge along the way. We'll take small steps to ensure that you have all the building blocks you need to be able to develop your own creations without having to rely on a book to get you there.
I won't be overwhelming you with large theoretical sections that you need to absorb in order to give you a solid foundation and progress through the series - we'll build our knowledge up as we go, in order to ensure that it has context and is therefore more easily learned.
