For our last planned out unit, our STEM class worked with arduino systems and dell laptops. An arduino is a learning kit that has many activities designed to teach some small basic coding, and about how breadboards and connections work. After we completed all the activities successfully, the second part of our unit began. The second half of our unit was challenging our newly acquired electronic knowledge. We were tasked with the job of creating a robot light show. The show required us to make our own code, and plug in all of our own parts.
Our Project:
Our Project:
This is our robot light show. I worked in a group of two with one of my classmates. Our idea behind the whole thing was star wars. As you can see/hear we have a classic star wars song playing with blue and red leds flashing. (These represent the two sides of good and bad). In between the two led pairs we hooked up and LED board. We input dashed lines into the software, and set the mode to scroll. This gave the appearance that the two leds were firing lasers back and forth from each other. We encountered lots of programming issues and physical wiring issues during this project. For programming, i twas hard to have all of our code working for 3 different thing s at once. And for our wiring it was hard to keep track of the different connections.
Reflection: This was a very good project in my opinion. It taught us a lot about coding and the basics to electricity in real world scenarios like computers. Definitely our biggest positive was getting all three different devises to power up on one arduino as it was very difficult. Another smaller positive was just getting through all of the beginning lessons. We did have some low points as well as high points. Our biggest low was when our original arduino broke. This left us work less (except for quiz studying) for 3 days. Our second low point of the project when our LCD would light up, but not show the words we had coded. Overall we did very well, but there is one thing I could have done better. The thing I would have done better is fix the broken part sooner, this way we get more work in.
Terms:
power: brightness of bulb.
current: flow of electricity.
voltage: push or pull of electricity.
resistance: something that slows, weakens, and reduces current.
circuit: A complete loop made of a conductive material from one side of a power source to the other.
parallel circuit: circuit with more than one route to take.
series circuit: circuit that directs current through multiple resistors in a row.
Terms:
power: brightness of bulb.
current: flow of electricity.
voltage: push or pull of electricity.
resistance: something that slows, weakens, and reduces current.
circuit: A complete loop made of a conductive material from one side of a power source to the other.
parallel circuit: circuit with more than one route to take.
series circuit: circuit that directs current through multiple resistors in a row.