Arduino boards are small computers with which you can read information from a variety of sensors as well as control lights, motors and other things. Many of the things around you are computers of different sizes. Computers do not need to have a keyboard or a screen. There are computers in the microwave oven in the kitchen, inside elevators to detect the buttons you press, and cars have as many as 70 small Arduino-like computers inside … there are computers everywhere in your life.
Category Archives: Concepts
Digital Signals
The English alphabet has 26 symbols in lower case, plus the same in upper case, as well as 10 symbols for numbers. Unlike humans, computers work and communicate with 2 symbols; ’1′ and ’0′. This is what is called digital signals. Using combinations of those two symbols, digital machines can represent just about everything in the universe. Arduino represents ’1′ with 5 volts (5V) and ’0′ with 0 volts (0V).
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Count in Binary
Human beings have a total of 10 symbols to represent numbers: from 0 to 9. By combining them, you can represent any number – 13, 648, 2015, etc.. In the same way just about anything in the universe can be represented with just 1’s and 0’s. You just need a system to combine them.
Imagine four switches that can either be turned on or off. Each switch has its own value, ’8′, ’4′, ’2′ and ’1′. When they are all turned off that represents ’0′ – 0000. To represent the number one you simply turn on the ’1′ switch – 0001. To represent the number two, you turn off the ’1′ switch and turn on the ’2′ switch – 0010. Now think carefully and try to represent the number three. You turn on both the ’2′ and the ’1′ switch – 0011. Because 2 plus 1 equals 3.
Try to get the number seven. Turn on switches ’4′, ’2′, and ’1′ – 0111. Try the number 11. Turn on switches ’8′, ’2′ and ’1′ – 1011.
Blink
During the programming introduction you saw how to make small programs and animations for your computer, using Processing. You were turning on and off pixels on the computer screen. The Arduino board has no screen, but it has an LED – a small lamp that can easily be turned on and off using a program. You could say that the Arduino board comes with a one pixel screen. That on-board LED is connected to digital pin 13.
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Beep
In this section you will play a little bit with sound. Sound is vibrations. The sound from a guitar for example comes from the vibrations of the strings. With Arduino, you can also produce sound by generating vibrations. In the following experiment you will do this with a piezoelectric buzzer (piezo speaker), making it beep.
Digital Input
The same way you can write HIGH or LOW to an Arduino digital pin, you can read a state generated by a digital sensor connected to it. Digital inputs can, just like digital outputs, only have two states.
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Sports
Now that you know programming, you will move onto electronics. In this block you will learn the basics of digital technologies that you need to know to make LEDs blink and to read signals from a button. Even though it is pretty simple to turn an LED on or off you will see that by combining digital components in a creative way you can make very fun projects. In the end of the block you will build small electronic games simulating sports.