Author: Anna Chau

This week we had to do lesson 4-6. Starting to connect our Arduino Wi-fi was very exciting and fun for me especially when I was playing with IFTTT. IFTTT made is very easy to make the function of the Arduino applicable to real life situations, such as telling me the weather to sending me an email.  At first I struggled with setting up the Wi-fi connections from Adafruit IO. There is just bits and parts, that if one is missing than the whole connection will not work.

EmailWeather

Connecting Two

Bill of Material

• Buzzer
  https://www.adafruit.com/product/1536
• Aluminium foil
• 1 resistor 5M ohm
• Breadboard
• Wires
• Would I need this? https://www.adafruit.com/product/1374
  Touch Capacity Sensor?
• 

Idea 1:

Water Tracker

A pad that you can place your glass on to keep track of the amount of water you drink each day. There is an app integrated with the pad to see more detailed analytics.

Idea 2:

Signal Headphone

A headset that projects a light that have certain messages to signal the person that you may or may not be available to talk to.

Idea 3:

Progress Bar

An ambient light bar that has a gradient coloration to track how far along you are in your task. An app is used to set the task time and colour configurations.

Blinking Light

This week task was to blinking onboard LED.

I have already finished lesson 3 homework from last week so this week I jumped straight into the Neo Pixel Lighting. I really enjoyed this week exercise in incorporating soldering and Arduino into one circuit. The lights were also really fun to look at but I would have to say when it came down to writing my own code, I got a bit confused on where to placed the coding. Hopefully in class the codes could be explained a bit more visually to me. Other than that the soldering and Arduino inspired me to think about plausible design for the Halloween costume as well.

Arduino Exercise 3

This week we deep dived into more Arduino exercises and started to add on knobs and switches to do more with the LED. Overall the lessons was a  pretty straightforward process likewise to the previous exercises. It was not until the third part of writing your own code, that made me realize how important it was to state everything and understand all the terminology more carefully.

First was the Digital Input

Next it was the Serial Monitor

Lastly I choose to do the option of turning on and off the LED with two buttons

This is the code:

 

//Turn on LED when button1 and turn off LED when button2 is presseD

const int LED = 12; //the pin for the LED
const int BUTTON1 = 9; //the input pin where the pushbutton is connected
const int BUTTON2 = 10; //the input pin where the pushbutton is connected

int val1 = 0; //val will be used to store the state of the input pin
int val2 = 0; //val will be used to store the state of the input pin
bool ButtonState = false;

void setup() {
  pinMode(LED, OUTPUT); //tell Arduino LED is an output
  pinMode(BUTTON1, INPUT_PULLUP); //button1 is an input
  pinMode(BUTTON2, INPUT_PULLUP); //button1 is an input
  Serial.begin(9600);
}
void loop() {
  // read the state of the push button
  val1 = digitalRead(BUTTON1); //read input value and store it
  val2 = digitalRead(BUTTON2); //read input value and store it
  //check what happened to the pushbutton1 when

  if(val1 != 1){
    ButtonState = true;
  }

  if(val2 != 1){
    ButtonState = false;
  }

  if (ButtonState == true) {
    //turn LED on:
    digitalWrite (LED, HIGH);
  }

  //check what happened to the pushbutton2 when pressed
  if (ButtonState == false) {
    //turn LED off:
    digitalWrite (LED, LOW);
  }

  Serial.println(val1);
}

This week we finally for our Arduino Kits and I am very excited to start dabbling with the things inside.

The first exercise was:

Add more LEDS,

The second exercise was:

Fading the LEDs,

and the Third was:

Overall the exercises were fun and I has definitely helped me find the patterns in the codes for Arduino as well as to identify better what each part on the board is for and where it goes.