Lesson 65 - Arduino

Yesterday we took a look at electronics and Arduinos. We discussed what electricity is and what voltage roughly means. We tinkered with some wires, leds and resistors to see that you have to make a circuit from the 5 Volt output of the Arduino into GND which stands for ground and is 0 Volts. We draw a lot of stuff on the paper to illustrate how our circuits worked.

It was fun to use the 5 Volt and 3.3 Volt outputs of Arduino to run some motors (voltage affects run speed!) and then leds (you cannot feed 5 volts to a led or you'll break it!).

She got really excited and told me she wants to build a robot that moves and talks. I used my consulting skills to talk this down to a single blinking led. We almost got that far in the end.

So, from a talking robot down to a single lit led we went. But we had fun all the way.

Today I build a simple instrument with a push button and a potentiometer for controlling output frequency. The speaker is actually the tweeter part of my 350W Hartke Bass Combo that got spectacularly destroyed on the stage some 20 years ago.

And that was super fun to play with. We agreed to build an electric piano-like keyboard instrument together. I think that's a really nice exercise really, as there's electronics, coding and even mechanics / woodwork involved. I'm planning to make casing out of wood. Let's see if we can do this...