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American Society Energizing Education submissionJune 10-14 San Antonio, Texas 2012Applications of Arduino microcontroller in student projects in a community collegeAbstractArduino microcontroller has been incorporated in our community college student projectsincluding interface with GPS receiver for the application of measuring ionosphericdisturbance. Our Arduino microcontroller was designed with an ATmega328 chip whichenables the training of our community college students to work on the CUNYminiaturized satellite CubeSat project at the NASA critical review phase. The Arduinoteaching protocol was implemented with our experience in teaching National InstrumentsLabVIEW controlled data acquisition board and Lego Mindstorms NXT programminglessons. Particular satellite engineering criteria such as power consumption, interfacealgorithm, etc are highlighted in contrast to those criteria in regular data acquisitionenvironment. The timing issue in CubeSat environment necessitates the inclusion ofnumber crunching in the Arduino lessons as well. Arduino microcontroller applicationwas found to be supportive in a laser lab class where students learn about general labcontrol and data acquisition techniques in addition to their laser work. Less criticalapplications such as FM detection with Arduino microcontrollers are popular in hobbyelectronics and usually attract the attention of students readily in an introductory session.Currently an application of Arduino microcontroller in field operation is being developedwith Brookhaven National Lab to strengthen our engineering technology curriculum.Extension to the use of Arduino microcontroller in atmospheric disturbance studies isalso discussed.