Introduction

There will come a moment in your experimentation when nothing will be working and you will have to figure out how to fix it. Troubleshooting and debugging are ancient arts in which there are a few simple rules, but most of the results are obtained through careful work and paying attention to details. More important than being smart is being stubborn.

The most important thing to remember is that you have not failed! Most makers, both amateurs and professionals, spend most of their time fixing mistakes that they themselves have made. (True, we get better at finding and fixing problems, but we also create more complicated problems.)

As you work more with electronics and Arduino, you too will learn and gain experience, which will ultimately make the process less painful. Don’t be discouraged by the problems that you will find—it’s all easier than it seems at the beginning. The more mistakes you make and correct, the better you will get at finding them.

As every Arduino-based project is made both of hardware and software, there will be more than one place to look if something goes wrong. While looking for a bug, you should operate along three lines: understanding, simplification and segmentation, and exclusion and certainty.