Robotic Art Show!
To start off this project, we began by learning about electricity, circuits, and currents. We Completed a whole packet of electrical circuits that got progressively more and more complicated, and taught us everything we needed to know about electricity, circuits, and everything in between. Once we completed the electricity packet, we moved onto using our Arduino boards and programming. An Arduino board is an electrical board that you hook up to the computer and follows the commands of whatever you tell it to do. How it works is, you plug the board into the computer and then code a program telling the computer what to do and the computer send the signal through the wire and to he board. However you have to set up the board with wires, lightbulbs, resistors, etc. or whatever your program requires to run properly. We did a 16 different sets of Arduino circuits and played around with each code to adjust what it did to learn about how the programming worked and how to read it. Once we were familiarized with the coding and programming we were challenged to create our own code to perform a robotic art show. My partner, Kendal, and I decided we wanted to play the song Happy Birthday while having a screen say Happy BirthdayTo You!!! It took us a couple days to program it, but we got lucky and had no major complications with our code and it went pretty smoothly. However later on we decided we wanted to include a light that flickered to the music, however we didn't have much time left to code it in, so we used a loop hole. Our loop hole was that we inserted our light into the same circuit as our piezo buzzer, what our song was coming out of, so the current flowing through the piezo buzzer was the same current going through the light bulb. This allowed the light to slicker to music with much less work! In the end my partner and I were very proud of our product and what we accomplished!
Our Code
Content
- Power - rate of doing work or amount of energy used per unit time. Measured in watts, calculated by P = W/t
- Voltage - potential energy drop across a component of a circuit. calculated by V= IR . Measured in Volts
- In a series add up all resistors Vtotal = R1 + R2 + R3 ..
- In a parallel add up 1/resistors 1/Vtotal = 1/R1 + 1/R2 + 1/R3 ...
- Circuit - a closed loop of conductive material from positive to negative sides of a power source.
- Current - electricity through a circuit. Measured in amps. Calculated by I = V/R
Reflection
I think this project went very well. My partner and I started off with having zero knowledge of programming/coding and didn't even know what an Arduino Board was, and by the end we were able to code our own program! I think we were able to achieve a lot and learn a whole lot more during the course of this project and I'm very proud of that. During this project I learned that I actually like programming and it's super interesting but can also be very very very frustrating when it doesn't work. I think its also taught me that I have to be more patient because I learned that I am very impatient which led to more frustration than there needed to be. Although this project went great, I think if I ever did this project again I would want to challenge myself even more and see if I can program something really hard like a game. A few other groups made games and I think now that I am familiar with how to code, I might be able to program a game on the LCD next time. I also think I need to work on staying on task and focusing more. While we were working on the project and things weren't working, I would get frustrated and then just go do something off task. However I need to work on this and maybe then my working ethic will be more efficient. Overall however I think our project turned out amazing and I'm so pleased of everything we've acclomplished.