Arduino

Arduino Breadboard

While it was the final project of the course, the Arduino unit was an excellent reintroduction to coding as the last coding unit that was required by the course was in POE. A series of tasks were given to two students and each task had to be completed by an individual Arduino program.

In any case, the arduino was wired to a breadboard which housed an menagerie of inputs and outputs ranging from joysticks, to LED lights, to potentiometers, and even digital switches (buttons).

Patterned Lights

One of the first programs was a relatively simple prompt: activate the LED’s and deactivate them in a specific order without user input. Deciding to not choose a “fancy” pattern, the program simply turns each individual light on one after the other, down the line, and deactivate every single one in a descending pattern. Each activation and deactivation was one second apart from each other.

The primary purpose of this activity was to familiarize students with grammar and language of the Arduino code program. RobotC and Arduino are somewhat different coding languages as RobotC is specifically only able to code VEX robotics while Arduino is more closely related to typical coding languages like Javascript or Python.

Joystick

The Joystick program was arguably the most difficult program to design since the inputs were not binary unlike any other Arduino program designed.

Some major obstacles, besides having to identify the position of the joystick by XY positions, was the need to use different variables, like “Serial.print” to identify the numerical position of the joystick, that did not show up in other programs. This issue was shared across many other groups and a large number of people collaborated outside of their designated partners.