First meeting.

The workshop was nothing near what I expected, but seems like a very interesting group of people. The range of things these guys did was fascinating however the project that jumped out at me was an appliance shield for the Arduino. One of the members of the group had created a shield (plugs on top of the Arduino) which you can then connect and control your appliances with. He couldn't stress enough about how dangerous it was (burn your house down dangerous) but it is inline with where i'd like to be with digital design.

Exercise 1

The first real exercise for me was to get the Arduino working on windows 7. As i'd never done any thorough 'run' based mods to the system is was the tiniest bit daunting. The LED light display was really exciting but i;m curious to know the science behind how the circuit board is programmed. I started reading about it here but there were too many acronyms for me to follow. My option is to ask the guys at the next meet for a dumbed down version.

Exercise 3

Whilst the many LEDs of exercise two work fine I cannot get the motor to turn in exercise three. I'm not sure what I've missed so again it's one for next meeting. I'm hoping to rig the fan up in front of the thermometer and have it switch on a a certain temperature, then as the blown air cools the thermometer the fan will turn off. Simple.

Class.

In class following the first meeting we ran through a little bit of ohms law. V = I/R:
V - voltage - the big water tank creating pressure at the top of the circuit.
I - Current - is the water that goes through the circuit.
R - Resistance - the size of the pipes that are in the circuit.

So, If you have a massive water tank full of current and only little pipes (lots of resistance) only a tiny bit of current will fall through. However if you have a massive pipe and a little tank all the current will disappear through the system very quickly. This is why ohms law is so important to electronics.

from there we experimented with the Blink project. To make it more interesting we added 'variable resistors' in the form of a dial and a flex sensor; these two thinks help control the speed at which the LED blinked.

LED :: DIAL :: FLEX SENSOR

To get the variable sensors to talk to the LED we needed to send it through the analog in's and use the function analogRead(XXXX). we then gave the returned value to an integer ei 'lightLevel' which we then fed into the stop start integers of the LED.

Concurrently we learnt the Serial.begin(9600); / Serial.println(XXXX); commands. This allowed us to monitor the information going to and coming from the arduino board which assisted us in debugging our code.