Phew! (And I mean that most sincerely.) Way back in the mists of time we used to call January 2023, I started a monthly series of “Arduino Bootcamp” columns.

These appeared in Practical Electronics (PE), which is the UK’s premier electronics and computing hobbyist magazine (see also my Arduinos and Solderless Breadboards blog, which I created to accompany the Bootcamp articles).

To be honest, I wasn’t sure exactly where we were headed when we started. All I knew was that everything was going to be based on an Arduino Uno R3. I also knew that, as much as I like playing with light-emitting diodes (LEDs), this is how every introductory Arduino course started.

I wanted to be different, so I decided to focus on 7-segment displays. We started with simple experiments, like controlling the segments individually, using them to represent decimal digits, then adding the additional hexadecimal characters.

After that, I just made things up as I went along. I played with a few sensors like a light-dependent resistor (LDR) and an ultrasonic distance measuring sensor, displaying the results on our 7-segment display. In the case of multi-digit values, we displayed one digit after the other with a pause in-between.

The final Arduino Bootcamp clock (Click image to see a larger version -- Source: Max Maxfield)

Eventually we added a real-time clock (RTC) module and started to display the time. We started with a single display. We presented our HH:MM values as H… H… … … M… M… … … … … … H… H… … … M… M… etc. (where each “…” represents a unit of delay).

Next, we moved to using two displays and presenting the information as HH… MM… … … HH… MM… etc. Then we moved to using four displays which allowed us to present the time in regular HH:MM format we know and love.

With respect to driving the displays, we used various techniques, including direct driving, multiplexing, and binary-coded decimal (BCD) decoders. We ended by using shift registers, which opens the door to all sorts of future projects.

The entire series ended up taking two years (24 monthly episodes). We finally finished it in the PE December 2024 issue. We ended up with a 4-digit clock, with each digit being controlled by an 8-bit serial-in, parallel out (SIPO) shift register in the form of a 74xx595.

I’m thinking about enhancing and bundling this whole series up as an Arduino Bootcamp book (like the AI-generated image used in the header to this blog). I approached the folks at No Starch Press because I love the books they publish. This far, however, it’s a case of “Silence was the grim reply” (sad face).

But turn that frown upside down into a smile because, in the meantime, the publisher of PE has made the entire Arduino Bootcamp Collection of columns available for download for only £20.00 (which equates to $25 in the USA where I currently hang my hat)

So… if you know of anyone who is interested in learning about microcontrollers and sensors and displays in general, and the Arduino in particular, it would be great if you could share the link to this Arduino Bootcamp Collection.

As always, I’d love to hear any thoughts you’d care to share on any of this (especially any thoughts about how awesome my Visio-created diagrams are LOL 🙂