The Faux Shaux

PComp – Lab 1

Finally had the time to check this board out.  Having not touched the thing since class a week ago, I stepped in all the bear traps waiting for the new user.  It was hilarious, I had no troubles with the breadboard, meanwhile forgetting to install the driver was the first time burner.  Then not uploading to the board was the second mistake.  Once Aaron & Maria called out my goober, I was good to go, and clicked my LEDs on/off.

The breadboard itself is old hat for me.  I must say, this is a bit easier than getting the PIC programmer running.  I’ll go ahead and recount anyway.  Connecting the 5V to the (+) and GRD to the (-), gave the board power and a place to ground.  Popped in an LED (long leg +) across the two leads, and viola, Rudolph.

Getting familiar with electron flow and the pins on the Arduino board, I used the 5V DC from the Arduino to power an LED on a breadboard.

Open Circuit

Closed Circuit

The next step was to connect a switch to the Arduino, that I would test its state (HIGH or LOW) with my code.  If the switch was closed, it would send the 5V back to the Arduino and satisfy a test for HIGH.  If the switch were open it would not return any voltage, and be set to LOW.  In the code, I set up a conditional that if the switch was closed, light the yellow LED, otherwise, light the red LED.

Once I started using HIGH and LOW values in the Arduino program, the voltage came from the digital pin outs, in this case I used 2 for the switch, and 3 and 4 for LEDs, as per the class example.  If the switch was pressed, I’d use the function digitalRead(#), # being the pin I’m listening to.  Using a conditional statement, I used digitalWrite(#) to switch on LEDS with HIGH or off with LOW.

Working in the shop was a lot of fun, albeit super distracting.  I think I helped troubleshoot four projects or so before even getting my basic Lab completed.  Aaron & Maria were having a lot of fun behind me, working on a way to hook arrange Dominos as 3 or 4 sequence combination lock.  The problem they were having was that they were sending separate pins to each domino, but they all had the common ground.  I proposed they use the analog in on the Arduino.  I searched on the Arduino site that the pin gives a digital value of the analog voltage between 0 and 1023, so I proposed that they should add a different amount of resistence to each domino, take readings and write if-statements correlating to the results.