Day 15: Buzz, buzz, a light activated alarm

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Arduino is really where my heart is, at least that is what I intended to get good at.

One year ago, near some Christmas holiday, I suddenly caught the Arduino bug after some co-worker rattled about kick-starters, IoT (internet of things), arduino controlled medical services. I bought an arduino uno, car chasis, motor shield, and a bucket full of little tools. Suddenly felt like an would-be electronic engineer.

The dream engineer career did not go far. After a few days, I felt hopelessly defeated. I stuffed back all my tools, arduino, into the little bucket, pushed them under a table and forgot about it.

I decided to go back. Arduino just seemed to be too cool not to know a thing or two. I also love playing with LEDs, a little programming on top of it is just irresistible.

Though mine, wires, breadboards, more tools, more sensors, more arduinos. And a starter kit.

I followed the lessons from elgoo uno starter kit, gradually electronic circuits become less intimidating.

Today I followed the YouTube tutorial Buzzer with LED and LDR and made an light activated alarm.

Day 14: A brutal work day ... nothing

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Staggered into day 14. And I did nothing to meet my daily challenge.

Worked all the way till evening. Attended Yung's showcase. Came home, finished remaining work.

So that was that.

Day 13: Firefly LED light jar

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Tonight, I followed the instructions of fire fly Jar, Arduino at Instructables and made a fire fly jar of my own.

The result is the following:



I could not be happier.

Day 12: A light house made on, hmm, Saturday

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Day 12 - Monday

Monday, the first day-light-savings Monday,  hard to wake Monday, a lot of work Monday. By the time I finished my work, it was late in the evening. Not sure what to do, I went on Khan Academy and took some electronic engineering lessons, then browsed wide-eyed the projects on instructables.

However, Yung has somehow caught the maker bug and tried to make a fan. Later Annya joined in. Using the lid from plastic box, we helped them cut up two fans of three leaves (?), they hooked it up with a motor and 9v battery. Whoa, the fan swirled, nearly cut Yung's arm. They squeaked in delight.

Other than that, Emma and Annya also caught the maker bug. On Saturday night, while I made my little crappy orange bug light, they were busy building a light house. Got to show it!

The light house that Emma and Annya built

The light house that Emma and Annya built - Close up. Decorated with shells, lit up with LED string lights.

Apply glue to the house

Paint the building blocks - popsicle sticks

Set up the house

Add roof and door hinges

Paint and build

Finish it up

Day 11: Can I take a break?

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Day 11 - Sunday

The previous week, I purchased a variety of things for DIY terrarium: DIY kit, sea shells, river stones, glass jars and pots, moss, potting soil, and so on. Yesterday, my collection of plants (13 in total)  finally made their way to my dinning table.

So Sunday the kids and I spent most of the day making terrarium. In the beginning, it was as bewildering and anxiety-inducing as working with electronics. However, terrariums seem to be infinitely more pleasant and reassuring and simpler than electronics.  After made a few blunders, Emma and I went into full drive and filled our empty glass jars with little plants. We decorated them with white rocks, marbles, even a glass chess piece ...

In the afternoon, went to a birthday part and did ice skating.

At night, I opened up my Arduino Uno starter kit tutorial from elegoo.com and continued my tutorial.

I learned about servo motors,


I was trying to hook up LCD display, however found my pentiometer went missing. So happily moved on.

I learned about ultrasonic sensors:

Day 10: A light house and a bug light

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Day 10 - Saturday.

Saturday night, I summoned up my courage to tackle the very intimidating problem of adding a light switch. The previous day I have 5 rocker light switches arrived. As a matter of fact, my house has become a steady stop of delivery men and women. My supply of electronic parts with all beautiful names such as SPDT,  IC 74HC595, three-pong rocker switches, stepper motors is steady growing and in danger of overflowing. Still every time I want to do a project, I found I have some parts missing.

Anyway Saturday night, I was working on hooking up a rocker switch with 2 AA batteries and a LED night. Fortunately, with the help of YouTube videos, I was able to quickly nail the switch problem. 

Yay, I got the switch to work

Another impossible feat of that night was I learned that the colorful plastic tubes are your regular plastic,  they are heat-shrinkable tubes. No idea where to find or how to use a heat gun (I later found we do have a heat gun), I fished out some matches and started burning the tubes, I was delighted to find that matches seem to work just fine, my tubes shrunk to wrap my wires tightly, even though it made my yellow tube black.

A bug night light made with a ping pong and some paper clips

After messing with switches and tubes, I proceeded to go low tech again and made a bug night-light for Yung, with a switch. Turned my connections were again unstable, and the light very often needs some wiggling and proding to go on or off. 

Day 9: A resistor tube man and a refrigerator robot

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Friday, I continued my easy way with electronics. I was frustrated with my forever lacking of parts, or parts go missing, and my forever unstable connections that leave my final products (can I even call them so?) unstable.

In the meanwhile, I developed eyes for discarded toys sitting in the basement, old electronic devices are now treasures to be hunted and disassembled. Wednesday I dissected a dead mouse (the kind with wires, not the kind that poops by garbage cans); Friday I dissembled an race car.  With that, I gained 2 chips, a bunch of wheels, some gears, a motor, a remote control that can go backwards and forwards.

I decided to repurpose the wheels and the remote control for some home-made robot car, did not work.

I tried a bunch of other things, all failed ...

I decided to go very, very low bar and low tech. So I made the following: a resistor man and a refrige robot. The idea of the resistor man came from an intractable article. We piled a bunch of sea shells at his feet

A refrigerator robot made of magnets and leds.

Resistor man soldered on an old chip

Resistor man soldered on an old chip

Day 8: Dumb dumb ping pong pot

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On Day 8, I felt my steam was out, more distracted than ever.  I happened to have a super busy day at work, sweating over a new language python. A breezy task such as sorting in JavaScript somehow became draconian struggle in Python.

Not just sorting. It was also a struggle with Django, with our code base. To my huge embarrassment I found myself modifying the wrong code block

...

At night, I watched a YouTube video on How to make a ping pong bot (then another one after that, then another, another.), so I made one myself.

Ping Pong Bot With Ninjago Lego onboard

Ping Pong Bot With Ninjago Lego onboard

An ad-hoc ping pong bot

Somewhere my wire connections were shaky, my bot ran about 10 secs, then went quiet.

Day 7: Crashing. Makey Makey music keyboard

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After about 6 days of working with Makey Makey, tinkering with Arduino and buying more and more electronic wires, switches, adapters, sensors, bridges, buzzers, now I sleep with my head of full of electronics.

Last night I could hardly slept, excited about the all the things I could possibly do with all those buttons, pins and wires.

Today I was sleep-walking, full of excuses of how I can excuse myself for a day. A day without makey makey or whatever.

I almost did. However a little voice also kept telling myself: how could I be sure tomorrow I won't be making more excuses and basically just throwing up the towel?

So I instead took upon an easy project. Making a music keyboard of sort using Makey Makey. The process is easy. I cut off a rectangle strip from my many amazon delivery box, taped long strips of almunimum foil for different keys, each with a different note. In the end I have a keyboard of 12 keys.

Time to play.



I spent the rest of the night binge-watching YouTube on how-tos and life hacks, including making a fire with lemon.

Day 6: Music Stairs With Makey Makey and Scratch

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I did it!

After the disaster from yesterday, I did some thinking and googling, found out a much better way to wire up my stairs.

No more easy-to-crumble bulky clumsy aluminum foil, or even aluminum tapes. Just copper wire tapes, alligator clips and lots of regular wires. Towards the end, I found that I can even do without alligator clips. Some good old wires are sufficient and less likely to stand in the little kids' jumping feet.

I set up the Scratch program, again a remix of some simple piano program. Ah, at this point, I have to say, I am totally into Scratch. Just to have the many many programs at my finger tips makes me grin.

My scratch remix is at here.

Scratch piano program made for Makey Makey

There are 8 keys, space, up, down, left, right and so on.

Day 5: Failed attempt at making a piano stair case with Makey Makey

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I got into Makey Makey because of a TED talk about Little Bits. Before I committed my 50+ dollars on Amazon on a Little Bits kit (it is about 100 dollars on Little Bits website), I spotted Makey Makey where it has far more favorite reviews. I ended up buying both the Makey Makey and the Little Bits kit (I returned Little Bits the hour it arrived, because I found some problems with the battery).

Failed attempt at building a piano stair case. Tin foil carcass and sad wires

Day 4: LED card (a glowering ninja) and squishy circuit

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Today is Sunday. I spent most of my afternoon and evening hacking led cards. At the end of it, we (me and Emma) made squishy circuits with play-doh.

I used to love chunky clumsy cheerful colorful flashy LED cards that plays music. Though those cards always inevitably worn out and became wires-intruding miserable eye-sores.

I still want to learn how to do it, since now I am interested in wires, LEDs and electronic sort.

There are quite some tutorials on YouTube, the basic ideas are building a circuit with a button battery, cooper wires, and Led, as the following.

Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_ApyKqqctM

All seems quite explanatory (once i watched the videos). I made a few cards based on the tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_ApyKqqctM). 

LED ninja card

Day 3: Hook up Scratch Pong game with Makey Makey

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So the Scratch game is done, it is time to hook up with Makey Makey.

Compared to computer, Makey Makey makes it easier to have multiple players; easier to use pretty much anything else other than the keyboard. I could have just use bananas. It might even be entertaining watching users brandishing bananas like maniacs.

So points go to Makey Makey.

However, Makey Makey is also clumsy. Problem 1: the wires can constantly fall off; Problem 2: you are forever tangled and tethered; Problem 3: You could start to notice that computer is acting strangely, only to find out that Makey Makey is inadvertently controlling a couple of keys.

Nevertheless, I got to hook up my pong game.

I decided to use real ping pong paddles. To make it conductive, I wrapped the padding surface with foil. I decided against real ping pong, because it is too light. Instead I used potatoes wrapped in aluminum foil.

So I ended up with some shinny paddles and silver goose eggs. Looking good. I hooked the ground to the paddles, and the eggs to the left and right arrows.

The game is ready.


It is playable. Though no real ping pong motion can be simulated. I do not think Makey Makey is capable of that, or I am capable of programming that. Instead, the kids just sort of banging the ball on the paddle.

After a while, it gets boring.

Oh well, despite all of its flaws, I liked it.

Day 2: Scratch for Makey Makey

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I always have a lot of reservation and frustration with Scratch. Part of it is probably because of the inner snob of me. As a programmer who codes for a living, I am impatient with drag-and-drop variables, operators, if-else, all that.

I have started and stopped learning Scratch quite a few times, each time I learned a bit more, then dropped because I cannot easy write a dynamic text to screen, or I stumbled on making a semi-presentable characters.

However Scratch just keeps growing and growing, in reputation, user communities, the number of jaw-dropping little projects.

No matter what I think of Scratch, it absolutely delightfully poses a lower barrier for entering the coding territory.

Now there are many many big players are in this kids coding / tech territory, attacking from different angles. Snap-together coding toys, graphic coding languages, yearly hour-of-code with a lot of celebrities and videos.

Scratch is one of them. Makey Makey is another.

So I wanted to go back to Scratch, and coded for Makey Makey, where games can be played by multiple players simultaneously, can be played just by tapping some foot pad, or banging on some spoons, or stabbing on playdohs.

Ping-pong came to my mind.

Luckily there are also quite some ping-pong projects available in Scratch already. So I took one. Remix is easier than doing it from "Scratch".

I remixed from a humorous Ping Pong (Ft. WO997) W0997 ping pong autoplay, throwing out all of the inevitable drama and swaggering and remade it so it can be played by 2 player.

The following is the end result. Maybe I will convert it a JavaScript game.

Day 1: Jingle Bell with Makey Makey, a rolling grape and an orange

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Today has been a busy day. I was almost making excuses not doing anything and making plans to make up for it tomorrow.

But tomorrow is Friday, it might be harder.

But Makey, Makey can be really easy and entertaining.

So i quickly searched for some ideas.

Makey makey belongs to the domain of music, I can say 70% of the projects are music related. The rest? Games. (Playing games with Makey Makey can be challenging though, since you are like a wired up monkey that often lose track of keys.)

I took the easy route and quickly hooked up the wires, makey-makey piano web page, and started banging the "Piano". Luckily, Emma truly knows music. With 4 keys, she managed to play Jing Bell.

So here it is: Jing Bell With Makey Makey, a rolling grape and orange.

Why the heck I want to torture myself

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