Uno Arduíño!

A shot of me pressing a button to light up a blue LED (basic circuit)

It is my first time using Arduino in March 17 during DESN3600 Lab, I had the best time tinkering around with it! I was jolly to open a brand new Arduino Uno from the University, so I get a hands-on on how to construct an Arduino board with its breadboard - plus cute, Arduino stickers that came with it!

I've always wanted to use Arduino, and my dad, who is an nerdy, electrical engineer (I wonder where I get my genes from), bought it for our family to experiment it out, but sadly its still back in Qatar, Doha. Its expensive to ship things from a country that is 14 hours flight away from here. Thus, I am glad that I do not have to spend another $160 dollars on getting Arduino.

Unboxing a new Arduino UNO! Feeling enthusiastic on touching physical computing!

During the lab, I was able to learn about Arduino, its components, Ohm's Law and IDE! Then, did practical tasks on how a basic, parallel, and series circuits worked. Finally, we built a Love-o-meter that uses a temperature sensor and lights up LEDs depending on the heat - All in 2 hours!

I have learned that it is always best to follow the manual first, especially when you are a beginner. I always have to keep track on which number and letter should a component go in the breadboard or knowing the temperature sensor's flat orientation should be facing. The basic circuit took me 6-8 minutes to get a hang of, series circuit is 5 minutes, 7 mins for the parallel circuit, then lastly is 20 mins for the love-o-meter!

I have also noticed how the blue LEDs are much more vibrant than the red and green ones from the Arduino box, is there a reason for that? So I searched it up and discovered it depends on my resistor, apparently [1]. So next time I want to use different colors, I will have to check on the resistors that it needs in order to make it work.

Helping others in building the circuits in Arduino is fulfilling! I'm proud to see Estelle getting a hang of the parallel circuits, taught her on following the numbers and letters placed on the breadboard and explained the reason behind the wirings in a way.

The picture below are shots from my builds, including a diagram from the Arduino book:

And on the other hand, I have been tinkering on how to fix my blog's display of images, because there are some gallery of images that have been stretched by some weird code as seen in Figure 1. So I managed to fix that, but it looks uneven although it does it job in not making it look oversized as seen in Figure 2. Once I learn more about SCCS language, I hope to make my blog look more better.

Figure 1. Pink arrows indicate where the stretched images are. Taken from apdv.dev

Figure 2. After fixing the code, does not look too oversized anymore but still have to do some coding to get it right.

Emotional Graph: Doing well for this week :)

I am doing all good this week, March 16 was a 'meh' because I was not able to do anything productive that concerns with DESN3600, but it has been super fun during the lab on March 17!