ADArC: Automated Design Tool for Arduino Circuits
Casey Wohlers, Yangyang Jin, Andres Negron, Cam Tu Le, Gabriel Buziba, Pradeep Radhakrishnan, David C Brown · 2024
Abstract Experimentation using microcontrollers such as Arduino is becoming common in several university courses and capstone projects due to their low cost. But students often face challenges with microcontrollers, sensors, and actuators. Novice learners in Mechanical, Electrical, and Robotics Engineering struggle with wiring components, coding, and interpreting circuit results. This hinders their progress and leads to time-consuming troubleshooting. Our tool, called ADArC, Automated Design tool for Arduino Circuits, seeks to alleviate this struggle by offering an intuitive software simulator that supports circuit design and Arduino code generation. Users can use the graphical interface to choose components, have them automatically connected on screen to the Arduino, generate and edit code, as well as run and modify circuit simulations in real time. In a class setting, students showed enthusiasm for this app’s design and accessibility, also praising its efficacy in enhancing their learning experiences. The paper will describe the details of the software.