Arduino Starter Kit Challenge

Last session, we got our first LED blinking – the classic “Hello World” of Arduino. In this session, we’re taking it a step further by learning how to fade an LED smoothly in and out of brightness.

You’ll discover how to control light intensity using for loops and analogWrite(), two essential building blocks that unlock a world of creative lighting projects.

In this session, we’re moving beyond single color lights and into the full-color universe of RGB LEDs! I’ll show you how to wire them up, control the red, green, and blue channels, and mix them to create any color you can imagine—all from a single LED.

But we’re not stopping at color mixing… We’ll also experiment with fun animation effects you can reuse in tons of future projects, from glowing props to mood lights to sci-fi control panels.

In this session, we’re turning knobs, reading data in real time, and teaching your Arduino to listen as well as talk!

You’ll also unlock two powerful tools that make your projects truly interactive:

• Conditional if statements: letting your code make decisions
• While loops: letting your projects react continuously in real time

This session is all about buttons and switches—the tiny components that turn passive circuits into interactive creations. You’ll learn how push buttons let users trigger actions, change modes, and control behavior in real time. But there’s a catch: buttons can be sneaky. Without the right setup, they can act glitchy, unpredictable, or downright haunted.

That’s where pull-up and pull-down resistors come in. We’ll break them down in plain English so your buttons behave exactly the way you expect—every press, every time.

In this session, we’ll explore buzzers, one of the simplest yet most satisfying ways to bring feedback, alerts, and personality to your projects. Whether you want your build to beep, chirp, scream, or politely notify, buzzers are often the very first step into interactive sound design.

We’ll explore both types of buzzers you’ll encounter in your starter kit: active and passive.

This time, we’re teaching our Arduino how to see in the dark.

In this session, we’ll summon one of the most deceptively powerful components in your starter kit: the photoresistor. This little creature changes its resistance based on how much light hits it — making it perfect for projects that react to shadows, flashes, and creeping darkness.

In this session, we tackle the thermistor — a tiny temperature sensor with serious power.

Thermistors are used in everyday appliances like refrigerators, toasters, and coffee makers to monitor heat and prevent things from going terribly wrong. They’re also perfect for emergency shutdowns when a circuit gets too hot.

Every robot builder eventually reaches this moment. The blinking LEDs are cool. The buzzing buzzers are fun. But now? Now we add movement.

Meet the servo — the core component of robot arms, trap doors, gauge needles, levers, secret switches, and any mechanism that needs up to 180° of precise rotational control. If you’ve ever wanted your project to pull, push, or dramatically swing open like a haunted castle door… this is your component.

In this session, we’ll explore how to control DC motors with Arduino by using a motor driver—the component that lets the Arduino give instructions while safely delivering the power a motor needs.

We’ll walk through how DC motors work, why motor drivers are necessary, and how to wire everything together correctly. Then we’ll put it into action by controlling motor direction and speed using PWM.

Stepper motors are the quiet masterminds behind robots, props, and machines that move with eerie precision. In this session, we’re bringing the 28BYJ-48 stepper motor to life using the ULN2003 motor driver.

We’ll wire everything up, break down how the driver works, and walk through beginner-friendly code to control speed, direction, and movement.

The first thing that comes to mind when you think of joysticks is gaming. But they’re also useful for controlling robots. We’ll learn to read the values coming from our joystick and then use them to perform a variety of actions like lighting LEDs and controlling servos and motors.

A tilt switch is a great addition to any robotics project and can act as an emergency cut off in case your robot takes a tumble.

In this live session, we’re diving into both the single-digit and the four-digit 7-segment displays—those bold, unmistakable numbers that feel like they were pulled straight out of an ’80s sci-fi control panel.

You’ll learn how these displays actually work under the hood by wiring up each individual segment (yes—every glowing piece has a job to do). Then we’ll bring them to life with Arduino, building from simple number displays to interactive, project-ready creations.

Displays allow you to untether your projects from the computer by giving you another more portable way to display information rather than the serial monitor. Displays require more wiring than the components we’ve worked with so far so we’ll go through the connections together and then program a few messages and animate text. Then we’ll program a simple calculator to output the results on the screen. In later lessons, the LCD screen will make a cameo as we display different sensor readings.

The popular DHT11 humidity and temperature sensor gives you two functionalities in one! It’s relatively simple to use but we’ll have to download and install an external library. These sensors are an essential part of weather station projects and when paired with an LCD, you can read values on the go! We’ll also connect other components that will perform different activities based on changes in temperature and humidity.

Ultrasonic sensors can measure distance and are great for obstacle avoidance and robotics projects. Like a bat, it uses a method similar to echolocation to determine how far it is from an object. The sensor sends out a signal and waits to hear the echo. It then measures the time from when the signal was sent to when the echo was received and we can convert this into distance. We can then display this information on an LCD screen and even create a push button distance scanner.

Now that you know how to connect a variety of components to your Arduino, you’ll be inspired to build larger and more complex projects. But what happens if you don’t have enough pins for your creation? That’s where shift registers are helpful. They only require 3 pins on your Arduino and you get 8 outputs – not a bad deal! We’ll be working with the 74HC595, or 595 for short, one of the most popular ones for electronics projects.

The pins from the Arduino can power a variety of components up to 5V but anything requiring more voltage or current can damage the Arduino if you try to hook it up directly. To control higher power devices like fans, lights, motors, heaters and other household appliances into your projects you’re going to need a 5V relay. The Arduino can be programmed to turn on the relay (which then powers your larger device) when a certain trigger happens.

Using remote controls with your Arduino projects is a great way to control robots, lights, relays and more – wirelessly. We’re going to learn how infrared remotes send information to the Arduino and then we’ll use that information to trigger different actions and control other devices.