Class Setup

Sketch Notebook

Like… an actual physical notebook with paper and some pens. This will be needed for notes, sketches and drawings during class and for sketching out ideas and prototypes for projects and assignments. If you’re already using a digital notebook app on a tablet… that’s also fine.

Git and Github

Sign-up for a free github account and add your name to your profile (video).

I recommend creating an organization for keeping this course’s materials separate from other repositories or materials you might want to add to your account (video).

Download and install GitHub Desktop. This is the easiest way to install and setup git, specially on Windows computers (video). (Feel free to skip this if you already have git installed or you are comfortable using the command line interface).

Arduino IDE

We’ll be using the official Arduino IDE. It can be downloaded here.

If using the Arduino Nano ESP32 board, follow this guide to install the board package from the board manager.

Also, these libraries are useful and recommended:

• ArduinoJson
• ArduinoBLE

p5js IDE

We’ll be using VSCode from Microsoft with the following extensions:

• Live Server
• p5js Snippets
• Prettier

Feel free to use other IDEs/text editors. I like VSCode because it makes it easy to work with git and start a local server to preview p5js and web projects.

p5js Template Repo

Use our p5js template to start any p5js assignment/project repositories (video).

And use the GitHub Desktop App (video) or VSCode (video) for cloning your project from GitHub to your local development environment.