If you’ve ever wondered what those tech people meant when they were going on about raspberry pies and r2d-nose, now is your chance to dip your toes into the tech world! Library Services now has circulating Raspberry Pi and Arduino kits at every campus.
An Arduino is a small electronic device called a microcontroller, which can be used to control other electronic components such as LED lights, buzzers and noise makers, motors and servos, and much more. You can learn to wire up the circuits required to make these things work with the Arduino and also learn how to write the computer programming code that the circuits run on. You will need computer that you can install the Arduino software on.
A Raspberry Pi on the other hand is an actual miniature computer. You can connect it to a monitor, keyboard and mouse, it connects to wifi, and you can install programs that will run on the Raspberry Pi Operating System. You can also experiment with circuits using the Raspberry Pi and the components that come with the kit. You will need to provide the mouse, keyboard and monitor to use this kit.
Raspberry Pi and Arduino kits check out for three weeks. You must bring your ACC student ID card in order to check out a kit, and only one of each kit type may be checked out at a time. To check if a kit is currently available, you can go to the library catalog, search for Arduino or Raspberry Pi, and then in the top left drop down, click Batlab to check only the circulating kits. Happy tinkering!