Tag Archives: Strings

Arduino Tutorial 19: Reading Strings from the Serial Monitor

In lesson 18 you learned how to read integers or floating point numbers into the Arduino from the Serial Monitor. It is also very helpful to be able to read Strings, or words from the Serial Monitor. In this video we show you the ins and outs of reading Strings into the Arduino.

If you want to follow along at home, you can order the Arduino Kit we are using HERE.

Arduino Lesson 5: Working With Strings

In this lesson we will learn more about working with stings. A string is literally a string or sequence of characters. The word “Hello” is a string of characters. Stings allow your computer program to interact with the world in a way that the world understands, so it is important for us to learn a little more about strings.

In this lesson we will be using the same circuit we developed in Arduino Lesson 3.  If you need help setting the circuit up, please visit lesson 3. Hopefully you still have the circuit set up, as we have used it for the last two lessons. The circuit schematic and code we have been working with is presented below.

This circuit will allow you to independently control two Light Emitting Diodes from the arduino microcontroller

This is the code that will run this circuit.

In the code above, notice that we are using stings in some of our print statements. For example the line of code above the for loop for blinking the red LED reads as:

The text in quotes is your string, and in this case is “The Red LED is Blinking”.  As you can see a string is just a string of characters. We can use strings to present meaningful words and thoughts to the user.  We are not limited to just using strings as we have above,  but we can actually create variables to hold strings. For example, in the code above one of the strings we print for the user to see is “The Red LED is Blinking”. It would be possible for us to create a variable called redMessage, and set redMessage to “The Red LED is Blinking”. In order to do this, we would need to declare the variable redMessage a string. We can do that up at the top of the program before the void setup, which would make it a global variable. The code would look like this:

With this code we declare two new variables of type String. In addition to declaring the variables we initialize them to their respective values. By doing this we can modify our print statements in the original code to print the Strings by printing the variables we have assigned them to.

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Notice when we print the variable, we do not use quotes around it. When we say to print redMessage, it will print the string that was assigned to redMessage.

By assigning strings to variables instead of using them directly it makes it much easier to modify and use your code. Try and get in the habit of assigning strings to variables.

When we have string variables, it is possible to concatenate, or combine stings together.

For example, lets say we declare and initialize two variables:

It is a good practice to try to assign strings to variables and then use the variables.