Lab46 Wiki

Basically, LEDs are just tiny light bulbs that fit easily into an electrical circuit. But unlike incandescent bulbs, they don't have filaments that burn out, they use less electricity, and they don't get especially hot. They're illuminated solely by the movement of electrons in a semiconductor material, and they last just as long as a standard transistor. The life span of an LED surpasses the short life of an incandescent bulb by thousands of hours. Because of these advantages, tiny LEDs are one of the most popular technologies used to light LCD TVs.

where's the demonstration

This project is a miniature and extremely basic version of minesweeper using the LED 8by8 Matrix and the joystick. The code selected a random LED and when the Joystick control gets closer to the selected LED a buzzer will sound higher pitched and faster between sounds. To select the LED that one believes is the answer press down on the joystick (axis-z). A red or Blue LED lights up, Red means the answer is wrong, Blue means the answer is correct.

For fso2, I used five items from my Starter Kit. Three LEDs, a proximity sensor and an LCD. An LED light is an electronic device that emits light when an electric current flows through it. So, an LED converts electrical energy into a light source. LED lights can also be used as an ON/OFF switch for a specific duration of code. A proximity sensor is a device that can detect or sense the approach or presence of nearby objects without touching it. These sensors also convert the information that is received from the approach or presence of the objects into an electrical signal. A Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) is an electronic device, which is frequently used in many applications for displaying information in a text or image format. An LCD is used for displaying the alphanumeric character on its screen. Alphanumeric characters are the numbers 0-9 and letters A-Z (both uppercase and lowercase). The LCD display is consists of 8-data lines and 3-control lines which are used for interfacing the LCD display with 8051 microcontroller.

Building the distance box.

Parts Needed: Foam board, Bass Wood, Clear Gel Tacky Glue, An Exacto Knife, the Arduino board that was finished being built in the fso1 project.

I used the foam board and the bass wood to build a box to place the Arduino board into. It's called the distance box. The opening in front of the box shows the proximity sensor and the LEDs. The other opening in the side of the box allows for the LCD to be shown. The distance box works in a simple way. As an object moves in front of the proximity sensor the LEDs light up and the LCD changes. If an object is very close to the proximity sensor then the red LED lights up and the LCD calculates the distance. If the object is halfway to the proximity sensor then the yellow LED lights up and the LCD calculates the distance. If an object is very faraway from the proximity sensor then the green LED lights up and the LCD calculates the distance.

Basically my fso1 was a distance sensor with a buzzer and light system. As you get closer the buzzer gets higher pitched If distance>30cm the green light was on and the buzzer was off. If distance<30cm the yellow light turned on and the green light turned off. If distance<10cm the red light turned on and the yellow light turned off. However this is a very shy pi so whenever something gets too close the pi gets scared and turns off.

It uses the last configuration of the breadboard for fso1 except with 2 buttons added. These buttons are used as a 'reset' and 'pause' button for the stopwatch. It iterates a counter every clock cycle to count its lowest value of time which is by far the least efficient way to accomplish the functionality of a stopwatch. The stopwatch only displays hours and minutes with seconds displayed on the six LEDs in binary from 0-59. This is not useful.

Starting the stopwatch is as easy as pressing the 'start/stop' button, on the left. This initially starts the LEDs counting up to 1 minute in the least helpful way. You can also reset the counter without stopping it if you want, but it doesn't matter anyway because displaying to a screen slows the program down so much that one second is like 150% longer.

This circuit uses the 4 digit LED display and the clock coding feature to serve as an active counter that begins at 0 and counts up to 9999. This timer is different because I have added a button that when pressed will halt the counting at the current number. Then, when the button is pressed again, the counting will resume at the same number, until the button is pressed again the process will repeat.

In this project, I used the Adafruit Gy-521 and two Servos. These electronics were used for the goal of making sure that a model rocket is properly orientated during its flight and guaranteeing a nominal trajectory for it.

The GY-521 is an accelerometer/gyroscope that will detect a change in the orientation of the craft as it is flying and will send a signal to the Arduino that the orientation of the craft is off. This will then send a signal to the servos that the orientation is off and needs to be fixed. Determining how much of a correction needs to be made is determined by a Proportional Integral Derivative (PID). A device that will automatically apply an accurate and responsive correction to a control function. This basically determines how fast/ intensely the servo responds to an error in the orientation of the device.