You have actually learned quite a bit in the first 13 lessons, and now we are ready to bring it all together in an interesting project. In this lesson, we will show you how to build a dimmable LED. You will read values from a potentiometer, and then based on what value you read, you will set the brightness of the LED. This is a really cool little project, and will no doubt get you thinking about bigger and better things. If you want to follow along at home, you can order the Arduino Kit we are using HERE.
In many real world applications, you want your programs to branch into different directions depending on values that you are reading from sensors. For such cases, you need to us IF statements. IF statements allow you to do different things depending on conditions. This lesson shows you how to use IF statements, and the different conditions that can be used with these commands. If you want to follow along at home, you can order the Arduino Kit we are using HERE.
Potentiometers are very powerful components that allow a variety of cool capabilities when incorporated into a project. A potentiometer is a knob, which can be used to control all manner of different components in your project. The potentiometer is basically a variable resistor, whose resistance depends on the position of the knob. We can use a potentiometer to do things like control the volume in a speaker, or to control the brightness of an LED. If you want to follow along at home, you can order the Arduino Kit we are using HERE.
In this lesson we will learn how to print from the Arduino. Since you are often using the arduino to make reading from sensors or other devices that interact with the environment, you need an easy way to get that information out to the user. The easiest way to do this is to send it over a serial port to the IDE Serial Monitor. There, is can be easily read and watched by the user. In this lesson we show you how to configure the serial port, and send values from the Arduino. If you want to follow along at home, you can order the Arduino Kit we are using HERE.
So far in these lessons, we have just been using the Arduino output pins. If we actually want to read values from a sensor or other such components, we need to learn how to read values from the analog pins. These are pins A0 through A5. This lesson will teach you all about the analogRead command that allows you to interact with these pins. Enjoy!
In this new series of lessons, I will be using this Arduino kit.
Making The World a Better Place One High Tech Project at a Time. Enjoy!