On Saturday, I was introduced to the world of microprocessors. A world full of robots, fighter jets, and self playing drum-kits.
The workshop took place at The Windy City Lab. I heard about it through its founder, Kevin McQuown (also instructor and curriculum director at Mobile Makers).
I’ve always wanted to gain a better understanding of programming at the hardware level, so why not get my hands dirty?
Before diving into our Arduino kits, we covered all the fundamentals (voltage, current, resistance). It’s always cool to see theory come into play with practice, and that’s exactly what happened in this workshop.
The Arduino IDE is written in Java, the language I originally learned to program in. It was a lot of fun to control different types of digital hardware (that wasn’t a mobile phone) through writing code.
For example, I wired a soft potentiometer — a soft and flexible strip that can detect when pressure is applied—to control the color of an LED.
Pressing down on the strip varies the resistance from 100 to 10k ohms, to control the LED’s RGB values.
We also played with light sensors, motors, and LED displays.
Aside from making things light up and move around, what I got most out of this workshop was seeing first-hand how electrical current and resistance makes programming possible.
I’ll definitely be playing around more with this kit. And down the road, I hope to experiment with wearables and low-energy bluetooth.
A few notes on Arduino’s IDE: Any function named void loop() will run repeatedly, and your microcontroller likely doesn’t have much memory space so use constants to preserve memory.
