Science Center Booth

This last week was National Engineers Week. Each year at this time, the Carnegie Science Center of Pittsburgh makes room (somehow) for a ton of engineers to come and set up booths with the goal of getting kids interested in engineering. 

FIRST Robotics is 4 tiered robotics competition designed for K through 12th grade students. I've participated in the program at various levels since 6th grade and FIRST is ultimately what made me decide to go into robotics. To help promote the program, City Charter High School's FTC and FRC teams set up a booth with Patricia Depra, the regional director of FIRST.

We had a large robot chassis up on crates spinning its wheels and smaller FTC robots hanging rungs. Over the course of the day (Saturday) I had to opportunity to speak to at least 40 parents about the program. While few of them had heard of FIRST, they were all really interested at getting their own children involved in robotics. 

Magic LEDs

With the basic LED blink program under my belt I decided to step the light show up a notch. Part of the Getting Started with Arduino Kit is a small LED which, instead of only making one color, can combine red, green, and blue to make virtually any color. I made a small circuit that lets you cycle through all of the colors in the spectrum by pressing a left or right or button.

Writing the program was difficult numerically because the LED works by receiving three different signals, one for each color. The signal strength, in the code, is denoted by a number between 0 and 255. To get the light to 'cycle' I had to increase one light to max, increase the next to max, decrease the first, increase the next and so on. 

On the left is a picture of the code within the Arduino IDE. Below also is a video in the dark, where you can see the different glows of the independent lights.


The full code is 101 lines long. To see the code from the program go to the Projects page, scroll down to the appropriate project, and select the code. There you can also find the schematics for the wiring.

Getting Started with Arduino

I bought the 'Getting Started with Arduino Kit v3.0' from Radio Shack. It includes the Arduino Uno microcontroller and a lot of little electronics. 

The microcontroller is the computer for the robot I'll be building. It stores all the code and performs the computations -- basically managing the sensors and actuators. Due to my lack of experience with Arduino (or building small robots in general) I also picked up a digital copy of Getting Started with Arduino Edition 2 to help me get started.

Programming the Arduino requires the Arduino IDE installed on a connected computer. This IDE (an integrated development environment) basically lets me write code and translate and transfer it to the Arduino. 

With the help of the book I was able to light up different LEDs (sounds impressive, right?). To do so I used some wiring, the lights themselves, and the breadboard -- all included in the kit. A breadboard lets you quickly wire circuits without using solder.

The circuit in the picture lights up an LED when the button is pressed and then turns the light off when pressed again. Going forward I'll keep making more advanced circuits on the same basic principle: sense, think, then act