Electronics for everybody: student practical experiences using Arduino

To design and build computer systems for the acquisition and treatment of environment signals often requires knowledge about electronics for a proper use of usually no compatible and costly hardware components. In the area of computer science did not exist a clear hegemony nor direct joint work with the electronic area in knowledge lines, specialization areas, and courses in their education process. Arduino reduces highly these barriers. This work details students experience using Arduino for developing projects to acquire environmental variables, visualize such variables, and for defined values range to perform certain actions on the scanned environment. Students are from the Computer Engineering major of the Universidad Viña del Mar (UVM), Chile who were able to develop competencies for the use of Arduino and implement prototype systems to reach the planned goal in 6 weeks. That proves that electronics is now very accessible to everyone.