Long exposure photography captures the path of light over time, smearing moving elements to produce a single photo which creates a new realm of artistic photography. However, popular subjects of light exposure photographs are uncontrollable (stars, car headlights, etc.), so we made a light painter using microcontrollers and a DotStar LED strip to develop custom photography from images uploaded by a user.
We ended our Part 3 article by giving you an assignment that emulates the card game, often called In Between (but better as known Acey Deucey). Recall that the objective of the game was to have the “dealer” turn two cards face up and then have the player bet that the next card would fall “in between” the two face-up cards. Let’s see how close your code came to mine.
Most LED projects involve some wiring, some resistors, a solderless breadboard, and a bunch of jumper wires. Not this one! You can create bright, stunning colors by literally just plugging LEDs directly into the Arduino pins. No wiring, no resistors. Just your Arduino and a handful of LEDs. The is the absolute simplest and lowest cost way to get started manipulating light and color. I’ll show you how to do it safely in this article.
While getting the correct answer to a programming problem is crucial when designing a program, it should not be your only objective. You also want to write it with sufficient clarity that someone else can read your code and easily understand what the code does. Let’s take a look at an example program to show the square of a number.
As a final class project for our “Digital Systems Design Using Microcontrollers” course we all took last semester at Cornell University, we created a very unique device. We wanted to design something fun, aesthetically pleasing, and interactive, and since we all enjoy listening to music, we decided on a music visualizer. Our vision was to create a unit that listens to music being played, then in real time displays a dynamic and colorful visual representation of the music based on the volume and pitch of the notes. Additionally, our music visualizer provides an alternate avenue for experiencing music for the hearing impaired. Here’s how we did it, so you can make one too!
This article gives an easy preview and shows you how some of the neat new features in the long-awaited Propeller 2 can be leveraged in your applications.
Stop spending hours fighting your breadboard! With the Dr. Duino Explorer, you’ll save a ton of time on your next Arduino project. Whether you’re a novice or experienced Arduino user, the Explorer offers an array of commonly used sensors and modules with the ability to connect and disconnect what you need at will. It has a novel mechanism for routing digital and analog I/O pins to wherever you need them.
In the previous installment, we discussed the Five Program Steps and how we can use those five steps to organize our thoughts about writing programs. In this article, we’ll discuss the format that the Arduino Integrated Development Environment (IDE) requires for your program to execute in the IDE. We’ll then examine how the IDE allows us to easily organize a program using the Five Program Steps.
An RTOS (Real Time Operating System) is a software component that lets you rapidly switch between different running sections of your code. Think of it as having several loop() functions in an Arduino sketch where they all run at the same time.
Most of us have invested some time in learning those things we want or need to do. Learning how to program is no different, and it can be an extremely satisfying endeavor. Seeing a device respond to code you wrote is, well, intoxicating in a good way. My goal is to create an interest in exploring microcontrollers and encourage you into investing $5 and some of your time into that exploration. I honestly think you'll enjoy the journey.
