During the second recitation, we were asked to build three circuit with the materials that we had from Arduino kit.
Materials:
From Arduino Kit:
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
From cart:
2 * arcade buttons
Circuit 1: Fade
When building this circuit, my partner and I didn’t encounter with any trouble. It went smoothly and we changed the “delay” in the code to control the fading speed of the LED.
Circuit 2: toneMelody
After we finished the circuit for the first time, it didn’t work while we made sure that the whole circuit was connected in the right way. Then, we found out that the problem was that we didn’t take the positive pole and the negative pole of the buzzer in to account.
After we finished the problem, everything went perfectly, but I found that the buzzer would only play the melody once. If I wanted to hear it again, I had to restart the program. So I moved the code from “setup” to “loop” in Arduino. And then we could hear the melody playing until we turned it off.
Circuit 3: Speed Game
Before we built the circuit, we found an interesting problem: one of the arcade buttons that we got was not soldered properly for the wire was not connected to the button at all.
The circuit of the Speed Game was so intricate that we found it very difficult to examine what was wrong with the circuit after the first failure to complete the circuit. After examining it for multiple times, we found that we connect an unnecessary wire to the ground.
The funny thing was that the circuit which we built was right, but we didn’t realize it because we didn’t fully understand the rules of the game.
Question1
In the text Introduction to Physical Computing, the definition of interaction would be input, output and processing. With my experience of building circuit, I think interaction would be the instant reaction of the components in the circuit to the information both from the physical world or the computer.
Question2
The reason why we use the 10K resistor with the button is to control the electric current and protect the circuit, for the button itself has no resistance for the electric current.
Question3
For impractical use or fun, I’d like to use them as a giant screen, interacting with people’s movement and projecting their movement on the screen with sensors and other interactive technology.