Welcome to our demo on Autodesk Circuits. I'm really excited to bring you this tool. I really enjoyed working with this tool and exploring it and preparing for this course, and the reason why is that it's a great segue for new developers. I like to make things as easy as possible for anybody that's new to something.

When I'm teaching them, I want to give them a tool they actually can walk away from and then run with it on their own. I believe that, as instructors, it's important for us to provide you with the necessary information and kind of send you out on your own, because we're not necessarily giving you all the information that you need to do anything. We're kind of like, essentially, opening the door for you, to inspire you, give you the tools you need, and then you can kind of run with it from there.

So, what's great about this tool provides a virtual environment for you to start working with things, almost like in a physical sense, but in the virtual world. And what I mean by that is that with internet of things, the device component of it is very hardware-centric, but what they do here is they provide you all the different electrical components in a virtual environment, so it's really cool for people that are starting to learn these things and starting to work with them, and I like it because those that are kind of hesitant about working with this, it provides them a free way to do it without making the financial investment.

So, when they're ready to do that and get inspired to do that, they can then meet that investment, which, by no means, I'm not saying that it's not important to do the hardware component, that is a very essential part of it, but this kind of leads you to that part. What it also does is it provides an environment for developers to test and build code for Arduino boards, and it really simulates that kind of environment, where you build and then test it by uploading it to the board here, and I think that's really neat, 'cause it really gives you, one of the biggest things about simulating is, you really want to kind of replicate the actual environment, so you want it to feel real.

If it's gonna be a simulator, you want to kind of get that kind of connection going on, you know? So when you actually do the real thing, it really kind of jumps over, and I really think this tool does that for you. So, in this demo, we're gonna walk through one of the tutorials that Autodesk provides in this environment by providing you with a tour of the dashboard, so you know where everything's located and actually see how it is to actually build one of these solutions, so that when you're ready to kind of dive in there, you can do this same demo and then go and do all your own projects too that they provide. So, what we're gonna do is we're gonna start by clicking on learn.

We're gonna scroll down here, and you can see all the different projects that they actually provide for you, which are just quite a few, so, keeps you really busy for awhile, just exploring and learning, and it works from complexity of beginner level, at the top here, on down to more complex solutions. And down here, you're getting involved with more code editing and working with those kind of things. Also to mention, there's a lot of community-based projects online here that you can work with different projects. Once you worked through all these, you can jump on something that might be more complex or just something someone else provided in the community.

So, let's get started with working with electricity here. We're gonna click on how to make a simple circuit with a light bulb. So, on the left-hand side here, they've provided instructions, so this is your tutorial, walks you through it step by step. Lower left-hand corner, you can see one of nine, so there's nine slides, this is the first of nine. Click on next, here, to go through each series of steps. You can see, they've provided quite a good amount of information for you to work through. You just click on the previous button to go back to anything you might have needed to go back to. Upper right-hand corner here, you see a gear, you can name your project. First project. So, this is nice because you can label your projects and what Autodesk Circuits provides is, each project that you go into to start working with, it'll save it to your dashboard, so then you can come back to it at a later time to explore it again.

If you get stuck in your project, you can stop, then come back to it to work through the solution again. Let's add a tag. First project. Great, so now it's tagged. Let's click over here. So, we're back out to the main area. Here's different views of looking through your... Different views of looking through, working with your project, which I'm not gonna get into in this demo, but just to show you that's there. So, to actually run electricity or to start your project in live mode, you click on start simulation. We have components here. And, from left to right, here's all the components, in grid and list here. That should have our Arduino basic kit, and a DFRobot beginner kit.

We're gonna work with the Arduino basic kit. So, to start building a solution, we need to grab a breadboard. You can just drag it or you can just double-click on it and it'll throw it up here. So, to minimize this, when you click on components, you just click out in the open space here to minimize it. So, this is the dimension of my electrical current. You can see the positive here, you can see the negative, so when I highlight this row, this row is all positive, and this is all negative. So, when you go to the next set of rows, you can see here, what is being highlighted is vertical. So, you could run negative or positive up this row, but this entire row is gonna be whatever current you're gonna run through it. Could be all positive or all negative. So, let's grab an LED light, and you see, there's different colors you could choose from.

So, with an LED light, this flat side here represents the negative side. It's a good way to remember, 'cause the negative symbol's flat and it's the same thing here. You can see a little lip here, so that's the positive side. Now, let's grab our power source. Great. So, now we're gonna run a wire, so the only thing you have to do with that is click on the little dot here. Like I said, this is negative. So that's a negative row. So let's go positive. And you actually get to control the color of the actual wires by changing it here if you want to. For our sake, it doesn't matter. So let's start simulation. Oh no, our light blew up. So, there's too much electricity flowing through our project, so you can see that this is just not gonna work, so hit stop simulator.

So, we're gonna need to add a resistor in here, so we can limit the amount of electricity that's good go through this. Just click on components. Let's grab a resistor. I'll click on this. So, positive, positive? So let's run our simulator. Okay, it's still too much electricity, so let's change out to a different resistor that's gonna hold back more electricity. Let's click on this guy here. Hit start. As you can see, this one actually works. The light is lighting up, it didn't explode, so our solution's good. So, our project's completed, it's a very simple project, but you got the idea. We gave you a tour of the dashboard here. Now, you can go in here, so work on projects on your own, and work some more complex solutions. But I really like this, 'cause I'm able to show you just something that's a simulator for beginning-level people.

Now, here at Cloud Academy, we have other courses that are for more advanced users, you actually can build from actual boards, and I'll list them in a future set of slides we've been working with, but I think this is a nice segue into that, it introduces you to that at a virtual level. Well, thank you for joining me, I definitely recommend you to get out there and start playing with this tool, and I'm really grateful to be able to provide this to you, and I'm glad Autodesk is providing this too. Thank you for joining me, I'll see you in the next demo.