Old Computer Challenge 2026 Day 2 - Coding Part 1

Okay, enough theory. Time to actually start implementing. First step is to download the latest version of the Arduino IDE, which is currently 2.3.10. I've worked with version 1 before so I think I'll get by, but there are also a number of tutorials available to get you up to speed. The Arduino IDE The Arduino IDE That's what it looks like at first boot. Very simple. The Arduino programming language is really just C with a number of useful functions and defines added to make life easier. Starting from scratch, I get an empty sketch (that's what Arduino calls the source code of a program) with two predefined functions, setup() and loop(). setup() will contain all the setup functionality that only runs once, and loop() is the endless loop that will never terminate which I've mentioned in the previous post. In my case I want to read the output from the infrared sensor and then evaluate it and pass it on to the computer via USB in the form of keyboard inputs. This means that the setup()…