Electronic Lunch 7/21

On Wednesday we discussed the future of Electronic Lunch. We are going to continue working through the Arduino tutorials and working on a group project. We are planning on making a shield together, a board with built in inputs and outputs, that allows the user to easily plug in motors and sensors to prototype quickly. This will allow us to learn more arduino together and create a useful tool for DL1.

Electronic Lunch 7/14

The first Electronic Lunch of the summer was very successful! We had 16 participants this week which included architects,

middle school teachers, Groundworks staff, U of M professors, a brother from Massachusetts, and robotics experts. Thank you all for coming and a special thanks to Bilal, Andrew, and Alex from Robotics Redefined for the first gr

eat lesson.

We will be hosting Electronic Lunch in DL1 every Wednesday from 12-1pm as a support group for people working to learn about microprocessors. If you want to get started on your own check out the links in the blog post bellow. The book, Getting Started with Arduino by Massimo Banzi, is available online through the U of M library (http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com/9780596155704).

In Lunch we had an overview of the Arduino. We discussed how Arduino is " an open source physical computing platform based on a simple input/output (I/O) board and a development environment that implements the Processing language (www.processing.org)."

Which means that you can have the Arduino parts a quickly prototype a circuit and program it with open source software that you can download free offline.

Bilal discussed how circuits must be a complete loop to function. Electrons have to flow a certain path from the + positive to the - negative or ground and we can manipulate them on this path to do work for us. (Bilal used the analogy of a house)

Bilal walked us through the different parts to an Arduino board including the breadboard, diodes, and resistors. Resistors convert energy in the circuit to heat and dissipate it so thing do not fry. The color code on the side of the resistor lets us know how much they are resisting. Andrew taught us an easy was to remember the code:

0 Black (bad)

1 Brown (beer)

2 Red (rots)

3 Orange (our)

4 Yellow (young)

5 Green (guts)

6 Blue (but)

7 Violet (vodka)

8 Grey (goes)

9 White (well)

( The gold and silver indicate tolerance)

The best way to get familiar with Arduinos is by prototyping with them and playing. Bilal started us off by walking through one of the first exercises, making an LED blink. The instructions can be found online as well (http://www.ladyada.net/learn/arduino/index.html).

If you want to try this exercise again feel free to come into DL1 and use the Arduino boards we have available here. We are open 12-9pm M-Th and 12-4 on Fridays. You can also apply for 24 hr key card access.

We hope to see you at next weeks Electronic Lunch!