Week 10 – Intro to Arduino and Flashing LEDs

In this week we started to work with Ian, he helped us to understand how Arduino world is structured.

Before i start to talk about this i want to suggest a tutorial to watch, i watched it before these Arduino lessons because it explains all the background about Arduino and all the story of how it is being made. I’m really proud that it is an Italian invention!

We started this route with Ian giving us a questionnaire to answer.

After this we installed the Arduino IDE software.

Then we collegate the Arduino (or Elegoo in my case, it is basically the same) to the computer!

Here we started to develop our first sketch on the Arduino software.

The code that you can modify.

• /*
  Blink

  Turns an LED on for one second, then off for one second, repeatedly.

  Most Arduinos have an on-board LED you can control. On the UNO, MEGA and ZERO
  it is attached to digital pin 13, on MKR1000 on pin 6. LED_BUILTIN is set to
  the correct LED pin independent of which board is used.
  If you want to know what pin the on-board LED is connected to on your Arduino
  model, check the Technical Specs of your board at:
  https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Products

  modified 8 May 2014
  by Scott Fitzgerald
  modified 2 Sep 2016
  by Arturo Guadalupi
  modified 8 Sep 2016
  by Colby Newman

  This example code is in the public domain.

  http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Blink
  */

  // the setup function runs once when you press reset or power the board
  void setup() {
  // initialize digital pin LED_BUILTIN as an output.
  pinMode(LED_BUILTIN, OUTPUT);
  }

  // the loop function runs over and over again forever
  void loop() {
  digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, HIGH); // turn the LED on (HIGH is the voltage level)
  delay(1000); // wait for a second
  digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, LOW); // turn the LED off by making the voltage LOW
  delay(1000); // wait for a second
  }

Resistors

I din’t added resistors to this project because Arduino should have his own safety system, but circuits need resistors for all manner of reasons. Resistors are used to provide biasing voltages that control the gain of amplifiers, they are used to limit currents to safe levels and prevent overheating, they provide a way to sense current and voltage for circuit control and more.

Example of a resistor.

With this kind of program we were able to turn on a led light with 1000 delay.

Delay 500

Delay 10, too fast that you cannot even see when the light is off.

Delay 20, this is the effect that we was looking for, like stroboscopic.

After this we programmed Arduino for make him accept 3 LEDs!