Now that I’ve got the first few basic experiments up and running on my Arduino compatible board, I should invest a little time into learning what I’m dealing with here. Fortunately there is no shortage of informative pages on the web to take me beyond the simplistic “Hello World” blinking LED demo for an Arduino Uno. At the end of that tutorial, Arduino point the user towards to either further practice with the desktop IDE or go browse the project hub. I found the former lacking in technical information I desire and the latter was mostly irrelevant to the project idea I have on hand.

I then turned to one of my favorite resources: Adafruit’s extensive tutorials. Specifically their Arduino learning center. To get a grounding on what’s actually on an Arduino Uno board, “Lesson #0” orientation is a great start. For a little more advanced information on Arduino Uno hardware (and how it has evolved since the initial release) their hardware tips, tricks, and techniques was quite informative.

But the computing hardware was never the core strength of the Arduino platform, it was the extensive ecosystem of code libraries. These libraries allow users to assemble code modules together like LEGO pieces to build projects. People don’t have to know every nut and bolt of how to write software for everything, because it has already been done and available as an Arduino library.

The selection of Arduino libraries has grown enough there’s a dedicated library manager to keep things under control, and of course Adafruit has a walkthrough for the library manager as well. At this point I already saw how to interface with a simple potentiometer joystick, and I knew there exists a servo library for controlling standard RC servos. I also saw LewanSoul offers Arduino library to control the LX-16A servos. In theory, these code libraries should let me build an Arduino-based Sawppy controller with minimal coding. Let’s find out if the theory matches practice…