Playing with arduino

assembling the spaceship console

Three weeks since unpacking the arduino kit, and I'm halfway through the book of projects. Wanna see some bits?

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This is the spaceship console. Comes with a cute cardboard chassis that sits awkwardly over the top of everything.

hotness meter using temperature sensor

This is the 'love-o-meter'. It uses a temperature sensor to pick up how hot you are; the LEDs light up accordingly. Turns out @niaalist is 3-lights hot. I'm only 2-lights hot. So obviously, this machine is faulty.

colour mixing lamp, arduino controlled

The colour mixing lamp was fiddly to build, and the lamp colour didn't turn out in the photo, but I'll blame my phone camera. The three light sensors are set up to read red, green and blue light levels, and feed it back to the arduino controller. The controller then sends a signal to the LED, which lights up to match the colour of light in the reading. Pretty neat, huh?

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I like this one. ^___^ Uses a tiny servo motor, a tiny potentiometer, and a hand-drawn sign to tell the world how you feel.

And here is the most annoying theremin in the world. Uses a light sensor again, and makes noise based on how much light it picks up.

A music keyboard. I should have had the foresight to make the 4th note a G, but oh well. Junior flavour 'Mary Had A Little Lamb' will do.

I must say, this is a lot of fun. Suddenly, electrical devices feel seem less like magic and more like awesome, hackable toys. I can't help but wonder how I might recreate some of these things after the apocalypse.

Probably very badly.

an arduino hooked up to a breadboard, c. 2016

electronics button panel

By the way, this is what an electronics button panel looks like without the actual buttons on top. The little interlocked E shapes are non-touching ends of a circuit. When you press the button, it mashes a conductive material across the two E's, which closes the circuit and transmits the button-press.

Learning this alone was mindblowing after a lifetime-thus-far of a) not knowing, and b) never even thinking to wonder. Imagine the exhilaration to then hack the buttons to make the device think someone pressed a button when really it was my computer sending a false signal. I felt briefly boss-like with a hint of cyberpunk.