Showing posts with label Circuit. Show all posts

Day 15: Buzz, buzz, a light activated alarm

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.
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Day 11: Can I take a break?

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:
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Day 10: A light house and a bug light

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. 

Nevertheless.

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