Week 1 - Introduction Session

Week 1: Introduction to Dr Anton Bowers and Getting to Grips with Arduino. 

The first lecture of Physical Computing consisted firstly meeting our new Lecturer Dr Anton Bowers. He introduced himself telling us about his day to day job being a Software Engineer mainly working with companies overseas.

We then looked at a number of previous projects that Anton had worked on including a number of projects that a friend/work colleague had produced. This was very interesting as although many of the project would be out of our skill range this gave us inspiration to think about what we could create during the duration of this module.

Following this we were assigned an Arduino to keep and experiment with. One aspect of this module that excited me was that Anton made it clear that he wasn't focusing on us succeeding in creating a project but would rather us experiment and fail but learning. This could allow me to set my ambitions high when creating a project as I knew that as long as I learnt from any mistakes this wouldn't result in a bad grade.

In my first and second year we have already encountered working with an Arduino so this was a familiar piece of equipment and software for me. After refreshing my mind with the software working in our table we managed to create two circuits.

Firstly we created a simple circuit with one LED using a circuit diagram and diagram on the Arduino website. LINK




Once we had set the breadboard up with the cables, LED, resistor and Arduino we took a look at the code needed to make the light fade.

From looking at the coding language that the Arduino uses and comparing it to languages I have used in the past I would probably compare it to Java or Javascript. This was good for me as its probably the one I am most comfortable with.



Code:
















Circuit Image:



After getting to grips with this code we attempted to add a second LED to the circuit. To do this we added a second resistor to the bread board and wired it to Arduino into the same row of plugs the other LED was.


At first the second LED didn't fade the same as the first. We knew this was something to do with the code so a number of small adjustments were made to achieve the fading of the second LED.










Adjustments:

The first change to the code was a new int variable created named 'led2' with a value of 10 for the PWM pin the cable was plugged into. The second was declaring pin 10 to be an output so the Arduino knew there was a new LED plugged into the bread board. Finally the 'led2' variable was set so the brightness could be adjusted.

After applying these changes the second light faded at the same time as the first LED.









Further learning:

During reading week I am going to read more into the Arduino to further develop my knowledge. Electronics is something I am interested in and one aspect I want to research into is what resistor should be used for different circuits and why they are used.

I will then try to apply this knowledge and create some different programs for the Arduino for example how to made each light flash at different times.

Overall this module seems very interesting and I am looking forward to learning more about Physical Computing.

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