Today we meet up with Rob again for an introduction to Arduino. Arduino is a little computer with only a memory of 32KB which can affect it's environment with things such as motors and lights. You could even use Ultrasonic for calculating the time sound takes to bounce of a wall, which helps artificial intelligence to find it's way around without banging into things.

For example, fashion students use the Arduino Lilypad to intertwine conductive wires into the fabric without having physical wires in the clothes to create a new form of interactive body suit.

These are all senses that could determine things in the real world.

Network wise, you can communicate with your phones or your web page with the Arduino.

The board below is called a Bread Board. It is reusable and easy to use for creating temporary prototypes and experimenting with circuit design.

IDE is where you do your coding which will zap itself into your Arduino.

The blink is where you write commands that would change the outcomes of the LEDs flashing.

Arduino Workshop

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The examples on the left are the different types of Arduino. Of which includes the Arduino Uno, Arduino Era, Arduino Lilypad, Arduino Mini, Arduino Mega.

During the duration of the class, Steffi and I grouped up to try out some coding to work the Arduino.

With the guidance of Lara and Rob, we managed to send out signals from the Blink into the Arduino through LED light responses that varied in spurts of light and the seconds in between.

We also had other tools such as resistors that help function as tools to speed up the light bursts physically.

The screen shot on the left shows the changes we made with Blink. We had to click the tick at the top left corner to verify that the coding was all in order, and the right arrow button next to it to upload the actions to the Arduino.

The process was a lot of fun and very enjoyable.

It was quite interesting to know that by tweaking bits of data in the computer via coding, the reactions between each LED could change in just a matter of seconds.

When we've got no money for Christmas lights and tinsel, we can just Arduino our way into a happy new year!