At some point it may be cheaper, both in time and materials, to use an Arduino Nano or Mini instead but using a full-blown Uno or Mega is an overkill quite often.

Absolutely.. the hardware side of this is not a problem as I am an electronics engineer (well was years ago...).
I imagine the final product as fitted to my motorcycle will be a nano as I don't need all the I/O, and the board is smaller so easier to package.
It's the coding that I need to learn and will likely struggle with.. but I'll get there in the end.

 

It's the coding that I need to learn and will likely struggle with.. but I'll get there in the end.

The programming you took to get your degree should be more than sufficient for this project.

 

I agree. I worked on Distributed Control Systems and my mantra was "I'm not a programmer" albeit I was but never wrote command line code. More of a system integrator of inputs, graphic displays, and outputs than command-line code writing. Picking up Arduino, which is a variant of C, was completely new to me but I learned it fairly quickly with some practice building various example exercises and having to troubleshoot to debug them. The Arduino IDE, Integrated Developer Environment, used to program with is actually very easy to work with. My previous code writing was back in the late 60s, early 70s writing code and keying in punchcards for Fortran and PL1 programming.

 

The Arduino IDE, Integrated Developer Environment, used to program with is actually very easy to work with.

Agreed. And the big thing is, you're not alone. Unlike the old days, you can find people all around the world happy to get you unstuck from some coding hurdle you've run into. Back in the punchcard era, we didn't have anything close except the fellow students you usually avoided.

 

Back in the punchcard era, we didn't have anything close except the fellow students you usually avoided.

You may have avoided them. I found that was a great place to get a date. I went to an engineering school in the punch card era, where the female:male ratio was 12:1. There always were baffled young women in the lobby to assist with their programming.