Sunday, August 4, 2013

Physical computing arduino lab meeting

I recently held a one hour demo/workshop on arduino. This was for a lab meeting with the Carrington lab (University of Washington, Friday Harbor Labs). We covered a few simple general coding concepts as well as arduino-specific coding and breadboard layouts. As I will show below I used four tutorials from the extremely well pedagogically-crafted ARDX experimenter kit (see link for their tutorials and code). The demos consisted of making lights blink (sending digital signals out) and getting temperature and light readings (reading analog signals). This demo required an arduino and breadboard, 6 LEDs, resistors, a photoresistor, and TMP-36 temperature sensor.

I'm posting ppt slides and arduino code here. 



Two blinking light tutorials: 

Demo 1: Blink a light
Intro to using a breadboard and to arduino coding language
Demo 2: Blink a series of LEDs on and off.
Practice using a for-loop control structure.
I think I only used 7 LEDs. 

Two sensor tutorials:
The light and temperature sensor topics were chosen to be of interest to my fellow field biologists who care about light and temperature in experiments and in the greater environment.

Demo 4. Temperature sensor

Demo 5. Add in a photoresistor to the temperature sensor code.