The opportunity for Arduino to grow in Morocco is aimed towards the Moroccan youth by offering them a chance to integrate technology into their everyday lives. The idea is based on integrating technological gadgets within Moroccan culture and traditions–by transforming the concept of “tech-shara” into “tech-heroine” which means “making use of your cell phone in a positive way”.
The aim, then, is to have an arduino maroc in every Moroccan youth’s hand. This will help them create new technologies and applications for whatever problems they can face in their daily lives. In other words, this project aims at giving the opportunity to the Moroccan youth to make the technology work for them, not against them.
In order to get you started as fast as possible below are some tricks which will save you time when developing projects with an Arduino board.
- The Arduino IDE lets you write code in several programming languages, the default one is C/C++ but since it is very popular many people have created new alternative syntaxes for this language (called “sketches”). It is recommended to use the Arduino studio which was programmed by Daniela Antonietti and allows you to write code with JavaScript.
- If you don’t want to create your own hardware or adapt existing ones by yourself you can buy them already done on sites like Tindie. You can find sensors, microcontrollers, 3D printed cases and much more there.
- Instead of buying a USB battery pack to power your phone when you are on the go, think about using two AA batteries for less money. You will still have enough power to recharge your phone 2 or 3 times more!
- When you are working on a project which uses several arduino boards it is good practice to put them on the same network so that they can communicate with each other using TCP/IP protocols. The Arduino Ethernet Shield works great for this but if you don’t want to buy one of those then just connect each board’s Ethernet port directly to an Ethernet cable and use the DHCP protocol.
- Never trust any data coming from an internet site, always validate, check and process it yourself before using it in your sketches. If someone has hacked a public API used by many applications, there is no way of knowing how your sketch is until some malicious code is executed.
- Before uploading a program to your Arduino board make sure you have already tested it on your computer by using the serial monitor in the Arduino IDE. This way when the sketch starts running on the Arduino, there will be no surprises and save you time debugging potential problems.
