This week I started to use my Arduino Starter kit to connect the breadboard to the microcontroller and light up my first LED diode. Had a couple hiccups when putting the resistors on the board. There were so many variations of the middle color stripes and ohm values of the resistors. And they are so tiny that it’s hard to distinguish what’s what. Luckily, my starter kit had a book with a very helpful chart on ‘How to Read Resistor Color Codes’ and decipher the math behind it. Another small problem that I ran into when uploading my code in the Arduino application was that I plugged the USB cable from the microcontroller to the wall instead of my laptop. Once I fixed that connection, my LED started blinking.
For this week’s homework of putting together a simple application for switches and LED circuits, I found a sample project of connecting 3 LEDs to a push button switch and used that as the base for the coding and schematics of the assignment.
My initial idea was to make a little house and use the switches to open a door or light up a window, but it morphed into an idea seeing silhouettes through windows at night. With the base that I had, I wanted to fill the house with LED lights, so I added a couple more LED lights to the board and adjusted the code.
I then cut black paper silhouettes and taped them to the board in front of the LED lights and constructed a see through building with tracing paper to enclose the lights and paper figures.
I was contemplating whether to draw black lines for windows, but I liked the cleanness of the white walls without the window and door details.
And here’s the finished version of the LED Dance Party on a Breadboard.
Dance Party from annemgal on Vimeo.