Recitation 2: Arduino Basics – Lillie Yao

Introduction:

For this week’s recitation, I built 3 different types of circuits. The 3 circuits that I built were called Fade, toneMelody, and the Speed game. All three circuits operated differently.  By doing this recitation, I learned how to program a button game, turn on a LED light, and play music with an Arduino.

Materials:

1 * Arduino Uno
1 * USB A to B cable
1 * breadboard
1 * buzzer
2 * LEDs
2 * 220 ohm resistors
2 * 10K ohm resistors
2 * pushbuttons
A handful of jumper cables

2 * arcade buttons
1 * Multimeter (optional)

Circuit 1: Fade

In this activity, I connected the Arduino to the breadboard to power the LED light on the breadboard. This activity was very simple to complete and code. Although I did have some problems coding with Arduino, they were easily resolved after reading through the code.

Circuit 2: toneMelody

For this activity, we learned how to use Arduino and a speaker to play a certain series of sounds/tunes. This activity took me quite a while because I was confused as to which jumper cable should be connected to which sides and also connecting it to Arduino as well. Coding it was difficult because at first, it didn’t work and then we tried to incorporate the “pitches.h” file and we were also having trouble figuring that out, but we got it to work in the end!

Circuit 3: Speed Game

In this activity, I had to connect 2 LED lights that corresponded with the two buttons. The game was whichever player pressed the button 10 times, they would win and whoever won would have their light start blinking and the speaker would also go off and make a sound. Some difficulties I ran into was that the LED lights wouldn’t flash if one player won. Also, one of our buttons wouldn’t work, so the same one player would win each game. In the end, we just switched some wires and it worked.

Question 1:

The technology I use in my daily life does reflect the circuits that I made during this recitation. The first activity reminded me of the lights in my bedroom that I turn on and off. The second activity reminded me of a lullaby box that makes music when you play it. The third activity reminds me of just a normal two-player arcade game.

Question 2:

I’m not sure why we need to use a 10k resistor but I’ve always used it.

Question 3:

If I had 100,000 LEDs of any color, I would decorate my room with a bunch of lights that would have the ability to change colors and flicker whenever I want it to. I would just line up a bunch of lights alongside the wall or make a photo out of the lights on my wall into some sort of design.

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