Learning about Arduino Microcontrollers
By Yiler Huang
Introduction
In this semester, we leaned how to build circuits with different electrical components. We also learned how to use an Arduino UNO board to control our circuits.
Learning About Electrical Components
Before building our circuits, we learned about different components and how they work. We learned how to know the resistance of resistors by looking at the color code on it, and we measured them ourselves. We also learned how to use a potentiometer and measured it's resistance.
Diagram showing the expected resistance of different resistors, including a potentiometer.
After learning how to use the components, we started making our own circuits. The first thing we built is a LED light bulb circuit.
A lightbulb with a 470Ω resistor
Video of me using a potentiometer to control the brightness of a LED light bulb
Learning How to Use a Breadboard
We learned how to build circuits with wires, but it is very inconvenient and dangerous to do so. Therefore, we learned how to build our circuits on a breadboard so we don't burn our components easily and it would be easier to modify our add something into the circuit.
I rebuilt the potentiometer circuit onto a breadboard
A simple illustration showing how a breadboard works
We also started making some more complicated circuits.
A circuit that has two LED bulbs, each of them is controlled by one switch.
One of my favorite things we built is the speaker circuit. It includes a speaker that has a potentiometer that controls the pitch of the sound, and a switch that activate and deactivate the speaker.
Video of me playing with the speaker circuit.
A close up picture of the circuit.
An illustration showing how it works.
Learning About Arduino UNO
In order to build more complicated circuits, we combined the breadboard with Arduino Uno board and use Javascript to program the performance of the circuits.
Video of me using UNO board to control LED bulbs.
In the end of this semester, I learned how to connect electrical components to a local server. Now I can send the data my sensors got and send them to wherever I want.
The latest circuit I built this semester. A pressure sensor connecting to Hydra, a live code-able Javascript computer graphics library